Tight supplies drive up prices and sales of many widely used parts in these market segments, but moderate growth in CMOS image sensors holds back upswing in optoelectronics, says Update.

A year after the deadly Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 causing lockdowns worldwide and a deep global economic recession, sales of sensors, actuators, and discrete semiconductors are sharply higher in 2021 due to a resurgence in demand across many rebounding end-use markets and significant price increases for parts in short supply.  However, optoelectronics sales growth has been somewhat muted in 2021 by the lack of a surge in CMOS image sensors, partly because of trade frictions between the U.S. and China.

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Combined, China and Taiwan would hold about 37% of global IC capacity, almost 3x that of North America.

IC Insights’ October Update to The McClean Report, to be released later this month, draws upon information contained in its Global Wafer Capacity 2021-2025 report to discuss the current high tension environment between China and Taiwan and what it could mean for the IC industry.

In IC Insights’ opinion, healthy future global economic growth is increasingly dependent upon the continued introduction of advanced electronic systems.  The critical components within these systems are integrated circuits (ICs), without which, advanced electronic systems cannot be produced.

The ongoing trade conflict between the U.S. and China has intensified over the past couple of years. Crippling trade sanctions, especially with regard to IC technology, that the U.S. has imposed on Huawei, China’s largest electronics company, and to a lesser extent on SMIC, China’s largest indigenous IC foundry, has, in IC Insights’ opinion, caused China to question how it will be able compete in the future IC and electronics industries.  It is increasingly apparent that China’s answer to that question centers on its reunification with Taiwan.

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