2021/02/09
News briefing
Driven by the strong growth of diversified terminal applications, the demands for compound semiconductor materials and key components should benefit significantly. According to the forecast by SEMI, equipment spending by waver plants for power and compound semiconductor components worldwide will jump considerably, by 59%, in 2021.

Impact analysis 
With the completion of 5G infrastructure, extended applications are expected to gradually increase. On one hand, GaN (Gallium Nitride) has the characteristics of both "high power" and "high frequency," which is better than silicon (Si) for its ability to accommodate high frequency or high voltage application scenarios, becoming the popular option for next-generation semiconductor materials. For example, if a millimeter-wave base station antenna is designed upon the SiGe element of the Si process, a large antenna array with more than 1,000 elements will have to be utilized for low power density, but this number can be reduced to 64 elements by adopting GaN. 

Strictly speaking, even if Taiwanese factories have only just entered into the mass production stage, competition in the semiconductor industry is expected to develop from current silicon-based logic IC products to technologies of emerging semiconductor components that are to be used in special environments in the foreseeable future. As for the maturity of related technologies, they will not only contribute to the progress of these high-frequency or high-power products, but will also help the PCB industry to expand the proportion of output value for this type of application.