Wafer material at the end of May

The 311 earthquake in Japan has been in place for more than one month. At the time when Japanese technology giants began to resume work, the strong aftershocks with a magnitude of 6 or higher have continued in recent days, and the problem of limiting electricity in summer has become more immediate, including the use of 12-inch semiconductors. Wafers, epitaxial wafers, compound semiconductor wafers such as gallium arsenide (GaAs), and other materials, the supply shortage problem is difficult to solve in the short term, the industry assessment, the fastest in late May will affect the production chain.

The Great East Japan Earthquake has hitherto been affected by strong aftershocks and power cuts, including the Fukushima Shirakawa Plant of Shin-Etsu subsidiary Shin-Etsu Semiconductor, Yamagata Yonezawa Plant of SUMCO, and U.S. MEMC in Japan. Utsunomiya factory and other three major wafer production bases are still in suspension. Shin-Etsu and MEMC announced that they will launch part of their production lines from mid-May and hope to return to full-capacity energy production by the end of May. As for SUMCO, no restart time has been announced yet.

Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. has already begun to use the same group's Sani Semiconductor and Nagano electronics factories as its production sites instead. SUMCO's Saga Imari plant, which was not commissioned, has also started to evaluate the possibility of putting into production, but the three factories have been shut down due to the shutdown. The production of 12-inch silicon wafers, accounting for 30% of the world's total production capacity, so the industry pointed out that it is too difficult to find other suppliers to make up for the 30% supply gap by the end of June, the fastest 12-inch twins will occur at the end of May Round supply tight problems.

Mainly used in epitaxial wafers of analog ICs and gallium arsenide (GaAs) compound semiconductor wafers used in power amplifiers (PAs). Although suppliers including Hitachi Cable, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Showa Denko, etc., have begun to resume operations. However, due to the lack of more upstream chemical materials, such as the high-purity hydrogen peroxide needed for wafer cutting, the Kashima Chemicals (MGC) Kashima Plant, which accounts for 60% of the world market share, is still in shutdown, and the inventory is only enough to use. At the end of April, it became another worry.

Smartphones and tablet PCs are sold, and demand for PA components continues to increase. However, the production capacity of Japanese gallium arsenide wafers, which accounts for approximately 20% of the world's total production capacity, is still unable to return to full production capacity before the middle of the year. Therefore, if the second quarter PA The demand for components has greatly increased, and the supply of gallium arsenide wafers will be in short supply. Therefore, the domestic manufacturers of gallium arsenide wafers, brand new optoelectronics, epitaxial wafer suppliers Han Lei and Jia Jing, and other manufacturers, the international giants have come to contact the supplier.

At the end of the first quarter of the year, Taiwan’s major semiconductor manufacturers still had 1.5 to 2 months of inventory in their hands, and there should not be much problem until the end of June. However, Japan's summer power curtailment policy has caused local suppliers to not be able to operate at full capacity. If new orders from foundry continue to flow into the stock market, inventory will quickly go down and wafer material shortages will occur at the end of May.