Hardest hit are ≤200mm wafer fabs, 70% of closures in Japan and North America.
Over the past decade, the IC industry has been paring down its older capacity as manufacturers have consolidated or transitioned to the fab-lite or fabless business models. In its recently released Global Wafer Capacity 2020-2024 report, IC Insights shows that due to the surge of merger and acquisition activity in the middle of this decade and with more companies producing IC devices using sub-20nm process technology, suppliers have eliminated inefficient wafer fabs. Since 2009, semiconductor manufacturers around the world have closed or repurposed 100 wafer fabs, according to findings in the new report.
Figure 1 shows the number of fabs closed by geographic region while Figure 2 shows a distribution of those fabs by wafer size and year.
Figure 1
