SEMI: Semiconductor equipment market to reach $100 billion in 2022

SEMI released its mid-year overall OEM semiconductor equipment forecast report online on the 14th, predicting that the global semiconductor manufacturing equipment market will grow by 34% to US$95.3 billion in 2021, and is expected to set a new record in 2022, breaking the US$100 billion mark.

SEMI Taiwan President Cao Shilun pointed out that the momentum for this wave of growth mainly comes from semiconductor manufacturers' continued investment in long-term growth-related fields, which in turn drives the expansion of the semiconductor front-end and back-end equipment markets.

From a regional perspective, South Korea, Taiwan, and China are expected to remain the top three in equipment spending in 2021. South Korea tops the list thanks to its strong memory recovery and substantial investment in logic and foundry advanced processes. Taiwan's equipment market is expected to regain its leading position next year. Other regional markets are also expected to grow this year and next.

In terms of equipment type, spending on wafer fab equipment (including wafer processing, wafer fab facilities and mask equipment) is expected to increase significantly by 34% in 2021 to a record high of US$81.7 billion, and is also expected to achieve a 6% growth in 2022, with a market size exceeding US$86 billion.

Wafer foundry and logic processes, which account for more than half of total wafer fab equipment sales, benefit from the strong demand for advanced technologies in the global industry digitalization, and will grow 39% year-on-year in 2021, with total spending reaching US$45.7 billion. The growth momentum is expected to continue until 2022, with foundry and logic equipment investment increasing by 8%.

NAND and DRAM manufacturing equipment are driven by the huge demand for memory chips and storage devices, and total spending continues to rise. Among them, DRAM equipment will soar 46% in 2021, with a total amount exceeding US$14 billion; the NAND equipment market will also grow by 13% in 2021, reaching US$17.4 billion, and will continue to grow by 9% in 2022, reaching US$18.9 billion.

In addition, driven by applications related to advanced packaging technology, assembly and packaging equipment spending will climb to $6 billion in 2021, an increase of 56%, and will continue to grow slightly by 6% in 2022. The semiconductor test equipment market will grow by 26% in 2021 to $7.6 billion, and will also grow by 6% in 2022, driven by the demand for 5G and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.