New briefing 
 
At the Code Conference held in Beverly Hills, California, Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) – a major processor manufacturer – said that the global shortage of chips will continue until 2022 due to the bottleneck in the supply chain caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is believed that the supply of chips may still be quite tight in the first half of 2022, with the severity only being alleviated by the second half of the year.

Impact analysis 

As for the current chip shortage worldwide, it is mainly related to 8-inch wafer products, such as driver ICs, power management ICs, audio encoders, and MCUs (micro-controllers) used in automotive electronics. Hence, semiconductor manufacturers around the world are striving to increase the output of 8-inch wafers. Based on the "Global 200mm Fab Outlook" released by SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International) this May, 22 plants involved in the production of 8-inch wafer around the world will be established before 2024, with a capacity increase of 950,000 wafers, an increase of 17%, reaching a new record of 6.6 million wafers per month. It is expected that the chip shortage will persist until 2022 when the supply and demand should start to balance by 2023.
       
Furthermore, the design of IC chips will be geared toward multiple layers, larger sizes, and finer widths due to the increasing requirements of high performing terminal products. This movement should render ABF substrates for IC packaging to be confronted with challenges in process and yield; as such, ABF sizes should be further enhanced along with advancements of packaging technology (such as CoWos, InFO, EMIB, and Chiplet) in the future. However, the current expansion rate of substrate factories that mainly produce ABF substrates is hardly sufficient to accommodate market demands. According to surveys by research institutions, the market demand for the ABF growth rate in 2021 was 27%, while the supply growth rate was only 16%; a gap between supply and demand of 11%. In this context, it is estimated that the period of tight supply may be prolonged until 2023, with supply and demand gaining balance only by 2024. Such supply and demand problem may also cause the average selling price of ABF to increase.