Earlier today, GlobalFoundries announced a boosted $16 billion investment. This cash injection will further drive the expansion of current North American chip production facilities. Specifically, an extra $3 billion will be spent on supporting advanced research and development projects. The multinational corporation's leadership outlined key R&D goals: packaging innovation, silicon photonics, and next-generation gallium nitride technologies. An additional $1 billion "capital spending boost" will bolster upgrades of the firm's New York and Vermont foundry sites. AMD, Apple, General Motors, NXP Semiconductors, Qualcomm and SpaceX were listed as notable partners—collectively, they are engaged in elevating the domestic semiconductor industry.

Top brass did not detail a firm upgrade timeline, but Tim Breen—the GlobalFoundries CEO—provided a short explanation (via Reuters): "the reason we're not sort of being super clear about exactly what's spent by when is because obviously some of this is demand-driven. We see a very strong demand, but it takes time to convert (demand) into specific ramps and project timing. And what you don't want to do is shoot too far ahead or fall too far behind." As part of the original $12 billion outlay, GlobalFoundries revealed intentions for its Malta, New York site. Around mid-January (2025), the company unveiled blueprints for an advanced packaging and photonics center—destined for construction at their Saratoga County-based chip manufacturing hub. GlobalFoundries is best known for its decidedly mature product portfolio—around late March/early April, the firm's executive team denied that they were considering a merger with UMC. This speculative deal could lead to a greater international footprint of foundries; mostly tasked with pumping out 28 nm (and larger) wafers.

GlobalFoundries is considering acquiring United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) in a plan called "Project Ultron." The two companies want to work together to make older types of semiconductor nodes. Both companies have moved away from making the newest, most advanced chips. Instead, they focused on making older nodes (28 nm and larger) better and cheaper, keeping them from competing directly with giants like TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. This type of market is mature nodes, which is the main target of automakers and commercial electronics (fridges, washing machines) that aren't CPUs or GPUs, where the latest nodes aren't essential. If GF and UMC merge, they could control about 28% of the mature node market, making them stronger against growing rivals. The possible team-up comes as Chinese companies like SMIC are putting more money into making similar chips, creating more competition.

The combined companies would have factories in the United States, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan, and China. Spreading factories across regions could help them keep making chips even if problems happen in one region, be it some tense geopolitical situation or sanctions/tariffs. It might also appeal to customers who worry about supply chain problems. Money issues could make the deal tricky. GlobalFoundries is worth about $20.41 billion but would need to borrow money or get more funding from its main investor, Mubadala, to make the purchase. Government approvals are another big hurdle. Taiwan might not want a foreign company controlling UMC, while China might only approve if the new company promises to keep or add factories in China. UMC has Fab 12X in China, producing 25,000 wafers per month. All of this is happening as GlobalFoundries prepares for new CEO Tim Breen to start by the end of April. He must handle these merger talks while keeping the company running smoothly in a challenging mature node market. Meanwhile, UMC has denied merger talk, but Tom's Hardware claims it has reviewed documents of the merger assessment.

Mid-week—at the World Economic Forum in Davos—India's government announced that its native semiconductor industry will release its debut product at some point this year. A similar announcement was made at last year's event, but the reported 28 nm "Made in India" chip would eventually miss its (then) projected December 2024 launch date. Press outlets have focused on Ashwini Vaishnaw's latest prediction for 2025—the Union Minister believes that everything will align neatly for his nation's fledgling semiconductor industry. Additionally, industry stakeholders have expressed confidence in the Semicon India program (initiated back in 2021).

He stated: "Our first 'Made in India' chip will be rolled out this year, and now we are looking at the next phase, where we can get equipment manufacturers, material manufacturers and designers in India...For materials, from parts per million purity, we need to go to parts per billion purity levels. This requires huge transformative changes in the process and the industry is working to achieve this." Vaishnaw is chief of India's AI Mission—this program has set itself some ambitious goals for 2025 and beyond. A primary objective is the founding of a common compute facility that will make use of 10,000 GPUs. The Minister for Electronics and Information Technology outlined the country's next phase of AI industry development—the creation of an indigenous AI model, and homegrown AI chip designs.

Lam Research Corporation today announced that its innovative dry photoresist (dry resist) technology has been qualified for direct-print 28 nm pitch back end of line (BEOL) logic at 2 nm and below by imec, a leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. An advanced patterning technique introduced by Lam, dry resist enhances the resolution, productivity and yield of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a pivotal technology used in the production of next-generation semiconductor devices.

"Lam's dry photoresist technology provides unparalleled low-defectivity, high-resolution patterning," said Vahid Vahedi, chief technology and sustainability officer at Lam Research. "We are excited to offer this technology to imec and its partners as a critical process in the design and manufacturing of leading-edge semiconductor devices."

After many back and forths, it now appears that TSMC is finally getting ready to start construction of its fab in Dresden, Germany. Multiple news outlets are reporting that TSMC is getting ready to start production on its new fab within the next few weeks, which is ahead of the expected Q4 groundbreaking. That said, TSMC has yet to announce an official date for a groundbreaking ceremony or a date when construction will start, but according to media reports TSMC's Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei will be in Germany at the end of August to sign documents with the German government and during this trip, the groundbreaking ceremony is expected to take place.

Assuming everything goes according to plan, the Dresden fab is expected to start production sometime in late 2027, but it's far from a cutting edge fab, as it'll mainly be supplying the European automotive industry with components. The new fab should start its life with two different process technologies, namely a 28 or 22 nm planar CMOS node as well as a 16 or 12 nm FinFET node. The Dresden fab is said to have a production capacity of around 40,000 12-inch wafers monthly. The new fab is expected to be an investment in excess of €10 billion for TSMC, with the city of Dresden spending an additional €250 million for a special water supply system and enhancements to the power grid. Unlike similar projects, TSMC will not be the sole owner of the new fab, as Infineon, Robert Bosch and NXP are each taking a 10 percent stake in the fab.

AMD today announced the AMD Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family, the newest addition to the extensive portfolio of AMD Cost-Optimized FPGAs and adaptive SoCs. Delivering cost and power-efficient performance for a wide range of I/O-intensive applications at the edge, Spartan UltraScale+ devices offer the industry's highest I/O to logic cell ratio in FPGAs built in 28 nm and lower process technology, deliver up to 30 percent lower total power consumption versus the previous generation, and contain the most robust set of security features in the AMD Cost-Optimized Portfolio.

"For over 25 years the Spartan FPGA family has helped power some of humanity's finest achievements, from lifesaving automated defibrillators to the CERN particle accelerator advancing the boundaries of human knowledge," said Kirk Saban, corporate vice president, Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group, AMD. "Building on proven 16 nm technology, the Spartan UltraScale+ family's enhanced security and features, common design tools, and long product lifecycles further strengthen our market-leading FPGA portfolio and underscore our commitment to delivering cost-optimized products for customers."

TrendForce's research indicates a dynamic third quarter for the global foundry industry, marked by an uptick in urgent orders for smartphone and notebook components. This surge was fueled by healthy inventory levels and the release of new iPhone and Android devices in 2H23. Despite persisting inflation risks and market uncertainties, these orders were predominantly executed as rush orders. Additionally, TSMC and Samsung's high-cost 3 nm manufacturing process had a positive impact on revenues, driving the 3Q23 value of the top ten global foundries to approximately US$28.29 billion—a 7.9% QoQ increase.

Looking ahead to 4Q23, the anticipation of year-end festive demand is expected to sustain the inflow of urgent orders for smartphones and laptops, particularly for smartphone components. Although the end-user market is yet to fully recover, pre-sales season stockpiling for Chinese Android smartphones appears to be slightly better than expected, with demand for mid-to-low range 5G and 4G phone APs and continued interest in new iPhone models. This scenario suggests a continued upward trend for the top ten global foundries in Q4, potentially exceeding the growth rate seen in Q3.

TrendForce reports that from 2023 to 2027, the global ratio of mature (>28 nm) to advanced (<16 nm) processes is projected to hover around 7:3. Propelled by policies and incentives promoting local production and domestic IC development, China's mature process capacity is anticipated to grow from 29% this year to 33% by 2027. Leading the charge are giants like SMIC, HuaHong Group, and Nexchip, while Taiwan's share is estimated to consolidate from 49% down to 42%.

Expansion predominantly targets specialty processes such as Driver ICs, CIS/ISPs, and Power Discretes, with second and third-tier Taiwanese manufacturers at the forefront
Within the Driver IC sector, the spotlight is on high voltage (HV) specialty processes. As companies aggressively pursue the 40/28 nm HV process, UMC currently dominates, trailed by GlobalFoundries. Yet, SMIC's 28HV and Nexchip's 40HV are gearing up for mass production in 4Q23 and 1H24, respectively—narrowing their technological gap with other foundries. Notably, competitors with similar process capabilities and capacities, such as PSMC, and those without twelve-inch factories like Vanguard and DBHitek, are poised to face challenges head-on in the short term. This trend may also have long-term implications for UMC and GlobalFoundries.

Winbond Electronics Corporation, a leading global supplier of semiconductor memory solutions, has unveiled a powerful enabling technology for affordable Edge AI computing in mainstream use cases. The Company's new customized ultra-bandwidth elements (CUBE) enable memory technology to be optimized for seamless performance running generative AI on hybrid edge/cloud applications.

CUBE enhances the performance of front-end 3D structures such as chip on wafer (CoW) and wafer on wafer (WoW), as well as back-end 2.5D/3D chip on Si-interposer on substrate and fan-out solutions. Designed to meet the growing demands of edge AI computing devices, it is compatible with memory density from 256 Mb to 8 Gb with a single die, and it can also be 3D stacked to enhance bandwidth while reducing data transfer power consumption.

DEEPX, a leading AI semiconductor technology company, aims to drive innovation in the rapidly evolving edge AI landscape with its state-of-the-art, low-power, high-performance AI chip product lineup. With a focus on revolutionizing application areas such as smart cities, surveillance, smart factories, and other industries, DEEPX unveiled its latest AI semiconductor solutions at the 2023 Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF), under the theme of "For AI Everywhere."

Recognizing the importance of collaboration and technological partnerships, DEEPX leveraged Samsung Electronics' foundry processes, harnessing the power of 5 nm, 14 nm, and 28 nm technologies for its semiconductor chip designs. As a result, the company has developed a suite of four high-performance, energy-efficient AI semiconductor products: DX-L1, DX-L2, DX-M1, and DX-H1. Each product has been specifically engineered to cater to the unique demands of various market segments, from ultra-compact sensors with minimal data processing requirements to AI-intensive applications such as robotics, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, and many others.

On June 30th, the Netherlands introduced new export restrictions on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Despite facing export controls from the US, Japan, and the Netherlands, TrendForce anticipates the market share of Chinese foundries in terms of 12-inch wafer production capacity will likely increase from 24% in 2022 to an estimated 26% in 2026. Moreover, if the exports of 40/28 nm equipment eventually receive approval, there's a chance that this market share could expand even further, possibly reaching 28% by 2026. This growth potential should not be dismissed.

Several manufacturing processes including photolithography, deposition, and epitaxy will be subject to these recent export restrictions. Beginning September 1st, the export of all controlled items will require formal authorization. TrendForce reports that Chinese foundries have been primarily developing mature processes like 55 nm, 40 nm, and 28 nm. Furthermore, demand for deposition equipment can be largely met by local Chinese vendors, meaning concerns regarding expansion and development are minimal. The main limiting factor, however, remains the equipment used in photolithography.

Russian business news outlet Kommersant has learned from industry figures that prices of natively-designed computer processors have been on the rise since the beginning of 2023. Domestic manufacturers of PC, server and storage systems are requiring greater supplies of CPUs designed by Baikal Electronics and MCST - the publication posits that growing demand and logistical issues have become the root cause of recent climbs in cost - individuals involved in the computer hardware supply chain have suggested that some processor models have doubled in price. Sergey Ovchinnikov, the chief executive of Norsi-Trans (a server and data storage firm) provided comment: "Production of Russian chips at foreign fabs has become more complex, leading to extended logistics chains and, consequently, an increase in the cost of the final component." International trade sanctions have not prevented the arrival of fresh silicon into the region - Ovchinnikov claims that an unnamed foundry is able to supply (likely via proxy) Russian developers with computer processors.

Kommersant's investigation found out that Baikal's BE-T1000 CPU is now sold for roughly $110 (8900 Rubles) at a popular computer hardware e-tailer (ChipDip) in the region. The very basic dual core MIPS32r5 (28 nm) processor was readily available for $50 (3990 rubles) back in 2018, so its price has risen by 220% in recent times. TSMC was contracted as the manufacturer of Baikal's BE-T1000 CPU, and the Taiwanese foundry started producing these SoCs in 2016. A Baikal Electronics representative has denied any involvement in driving up MSRP, and states that it is up to distributors and retail outfits to determine prices. The company suspects that very old stock is being sold at inflated rates - Kommersant was unable to contact anyone at ChipDip for a statement.

TSMC, a Taiwanese semiconductor giant, is reportedly talking to its partners to develop an $11 billion (€10 billion) factory in Germany with the help of a few European partners. Currently assessing the plant location for Saxony in Germany, the fab wouldn't only be exclusively made by TSMC but will bring in NXP, Bosch, and Infineon that, will create a budget of around 7 billion Euros, including state subsidies, while the total budget is leaning closer to 10 billion Euros in total. However, it is essential to note that TSMC is still assessing the possibility of a Europe-based plant altogether.

Asking for as much as 40% of the total investment to be European-backed subsidies, TSMC wants to create a European facility that will be focused on a growing sector--automotive. If approved in August, the TSMC plant will become the company's first European facility and will first focus on manufacturing 28 nm chips. As one of the first significant EU Chips Act €43 billion investment, it will heavily boost European semiconductor manufacturing.

TrendForce reports that the US Department of Commerce recently released details regarding its CHIPS and Science Act, which stipulates that beneficiaries of the act will be restricted in their investment activities—for more advanced and mature processes—in China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia for the next ten years. The scope of restrictions in this updated legislation will be far more extensive than the previous export ban, further reducing the willingness of multinational semiconductor companies to invest in China for the next decade.

CHIPS Act will mainly impact TSMC; and as the decoupling of the supply chain continues, VIS and PSMC capture orders rerouted from Chinese foundries
In recent years, the US has banned semiconductor exports and passed the CHIPS Act, all to ensure supply chains decoupling from China. Initially, bans on exports were primarily focused on non-planar transistor architecture (16/14 nm and more advanced processes). However, Japan and the Netherlands have also announced that they intend to join the sanctions, which means key DUV immersion systems, used for producing both sub-16 nm and 40/28 nm mature processes, are likely to be included within the scope of the ban as well. These developments, in conjunction with the CHIPS Act, mean that the expansion of both Chinese foundries and multinational foundries in China will be suppressed to varying degrees—regardless of whether they are advanced or mature processes.

TrendForce's recent analysis of the foundry market reveals that demand continues to slide for all types of mature and advanced nodes. The major IC design houses have cut wafer input for 1Q23 and will likely scale back further for 2Q23. Currently, foundries are expected to maintain a lower-than-ideal level of capacity utilization rate in the first two quarters of this year. Some nodes could experience a steeper demand drop in 2Q23 as there are still no signs of a significant rebound in wafer orders. Looking ahead to the second half of this year, orders will likely pick up for some components that underwent an inventory correction at an earlier time. However, the state of the global economy will remain the largest variable that affect demand, and the recovery of individual foundries' capacity utilization rates will not occur as quickly as expected. Taking these factors into account, TrendForce currently forecasts that global foundry revenue will drop by around 4% YoY for 2023. The projected decline for 2023 is more severe when compared with the one that was recorded for 2019.

United Microelectronics Corporation ("UMC" or "The Company"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced its consolidated operating results for the fourth quarter of 2022. Fourth quarter consolidated revenue was NT$67.84 billion, decreasing 10.0% QoQ from NT$75.39 billion in 3Q22. Compared to a year ago, 4Q22 revenue grew 14.8% YoY from NT$59.10 billion in 4Q21. Consolidated gross margin for 4Q22 was 42.9%. Net income attributable to the shareholders of the parent was NT$19.1 billion, with earnings per ordinary share of NT$1.54.

Jason Wang, co-president of UMC, said, "In the fourth quarter, due to a significant slowdown across most of our end markets and inventory correction in the semiconductor industry, our wafer shipments fell 14.8% QoQ while overall fab utilization rate dropped to 90%. Average selling price increased slightly during the quarter as a result of our ongoing product mix optimization efforts, moderating the decline in revenue."

On the day of TSMC's celebration of the mass production start of its 3 nm node, news out of Taiwan suggests that all of its top 10 customers have cut their orders for 2023. However, the cuts are unlikely to affect its new node, but rather its existing nodes, with the 7 and 6 nm nodes said to be hit the hardest, by as much as a 50 percent utilisation reduction in the first quarter of 2023. The 28 nm and 5 and 4 nm nodes are also said to be affected, although it's unclear by how much at this point in time.

Revenue is expected to fall by at least 15 percent in the first quarter of 2023 for TSMC, based on numbers from DigiTimes. The fact that TSMC has increased its 2023 pricing by six percent should at least help offset some of the potential losses for the company, but it all depends on the demand for the rest of the year. Demand for mobile devices is down globally, which is part of the reason why so many of TSMC's customers have cut back their orders, as Apple, Qualcomm and Mediatek all produce their mobile SoCs at TSMC. Add to this that the demand for computers and new computer components are also down, largely due to the current pricing and TSMC is in for a tough time next year.

According to TrendForce's research, the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries rose by 6% QoQ to US$35.21 billion for 3Q22 as the release of the new iPhone series during the second half of the year generated significant stock-up activities across Apple's supply chain. However, the global economy shows weak performances, and factors such as China's policy on containing COVID-19 outbreaks and high inflation continue to impact consumer confidence. As a result, peak-season demand in the second half of the year has been underwhelming, and inventory consumption is proceeding slower than anticipated. This situation has led to substantial downward corrections to foundry orders as well. For 4Q22, TrendForce forecasts that the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries will register a QoQ decline, thereby terminating the boom of the past two years—when there was an uninterrupted trend of QoQ revenue growth.

Regarding individual foundries' performances in 3Q22, the group of the top five was led by TSMC, followed by Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC. Their collective global market share (in revenue terms) came to 89.6%. Most foundries were directly impacted by clients slowing down their stock-up activities or significantly correcting down their orders. Only TSMC was able to make a notable gain due to Apple's strong stock-up demand for the SoCs deployed in this year's new iPhone models. TSMC saw its revenue rise by 11.1% QoQ to US$20.16 billion, and the corresponding market share expanded to 56.1%. The growth was mainly attributed to the ≤7 nm nodes, whose share in the foundry's revenue had kept climbing and reached 54% in the third quarter. Conversely, Samsung actually experienced a slight QoQ drop of 0.1% in foundry revenue even though it had also benefited from the component demand related to the new iPhone series. Partially impacted by the weakening of the Korean won, Samsung's market share fell to 15.5%.

Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), now part of AMD, are always in demand in the semiconductor industry. Today, AMD has shared a letter to Xilinx customers that the selected FPGA device series will receive an 8-25% price increase. Citing AMD's investment into the supply chain, along with increased prices from the suppliers, Xilinx FPGAs will get more expensive. From January 9, 2023, the cost of the Spartan 6 series will increase by 25%, the price of the Versal series will not increase, and all other Xilinx products will increase by 8%. Interestingly, the older series manufactured on 40-28 nm nodes will increase while the latest Versal series doesn't experience any change.

Regarding lead times, the 16 nm UltraScale+ series, 20 nm UltraScale series, and 28 nm 7 series all take 20 weeks from order to delivery, which will remain until the third quarter of 2023. You can read the entire document below.

It's not only Intel that has been showing off new graphics cards recently, as Chinese company Glenfly has revealed more details about its Arise-GT10C0 graphics card. To be clear from the start, this is not a graphics card for gamers, but rather for the PRC government and its computers, as the nation is trying to become self-sufficient when it comes to computer hardware for its government agencies and other government backed organisations. The 28 nm GPU has a clock speed of a whopping 500 MHz and delivers 1.5 TFLOPs of FP32 performance, which places it firmly in yesteryear's performance category. Glenfly claims support for up to 4K resolution, althought this is most likely only for desktop use.

The GPU is paired with 2 or 4 GB of DDR4 memory with a clock speed of 1200 MHz, using either a 64 or a 128 bit memory interface. The actual cards have a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface and have support for unspecified HDMI and DP interfaces, as well as D-Sub VGA ports. Driver support includes DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.5 and OpenCL 1.2. The GPU is also said to have hardware offload support for HEVC and H.264 hardware encoding, as well as decoding for both formats, plus most other common video formats, although, oddly enough, support for AVS, which is China's homebrewed video codec, is missing. OS support includes various Chinese flavours of Linux, Ubuntu and Windows according to Glenfly and outside of the x86 processor world, MIPS and arm based processors are said be supported.

Foxconn's ambitions as a semiconductor player are growing with yet another potential joint venture being announced, this time in Malaysia. Hang on, Foxconn doesn't make semiconductors you might be thinking right now, but the company has actually owned semiconductor fabs since 2016, when it acquired Sharp and ended up with an 8-inch fab in Fukuyama in Japan. Foxconn has also tried to buy an 8-inch fab in Malaysia in 2020, as well as trying to take over Taiwanese non-volatile memory manufacturer Macronix at one point. It seems like the company has decided to take a different route this year, with news of a joint venture in India and now plans of another joint venture with Dagang NeXchange Berhad (DNex) in Malaysia.

The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), although it's a subsidiary of Foxconn, Big Innovation Holding Limited (BIH) that actually signed the paperwork. The MOU is about building a 12-inch fab according to Focus Taiwan/CNA which reports that the fab will be making chips using 40 to 28 nm processes. It's possible that this will be for the various EV projects that Foxconn is involved with and it would be a less risky way to enter the semiconductor market for Foxconn. The fab is said to be able to output 40,000 wafers a month once it starts, although when this will be is anyone's guess at the moment. Foxconn's focus is on what the company calls the 3 plus 3 initiative, which relates to electrical vehicles, robotics and healthcare solutions, which are built in AI, semiconductors and communication technologies, all presumably from within Foxconn. Time will tell if Foxconn manages to pull this off, but until the construction of the fab has started, this is nothing more than a potential project for Foxconn.

Ten years ago, in 2012, NVIDIA introduced its Kepler series of graphics cards based on the TSMC 28 nm node. Architecture has been supported for quite a while now by NVIDIA's drivers, and the last series to carry support was the 470 driver class. Today, NVIDIA pushed a security update in the form of a 473.47 WHQL driver that brings fixes to various CVE vulnerabilities that can cause anything from issues that may lead to denial of service, information disclosure, or data tampering. This driver version has no fixed matters and doesn't bring any additional features except the fix for vulnerabilities. With CVEs rated from 4.1 to 8.5, NVIDIA has fixed major issues bugging Kepler GPU users. With a high risk for code execution, denial of service, escalation of privileges, information disclosure, and data tampering, the 473.47 WHQL driver is another step for supporting Kepler architecture until 2024, when NVIDIA plans to drop the support for this architecture. Supported cards are GT 600, GT 700, GTX 600, GTX 700, Titan, Titan Black, and Titan Z.

The updated drivers are available for installation on NVIDIA's website and for users of TechPowerUp's NVCleanstall software.

The output value of the world's top 10 foundries in 4Q21 reached US$29.55 billion, or 8.3% growth QoQ, according to TrendForce's research. This is due to the interaction of two major factors. One is limited growth in overall production capacity. At present, the shortage of certain components for TVs and laptops has eased but there are other peripheral materials derived from mature process such as PMIC, Wi-Fi, and MCU that are still in short supply, precipitating continued fully loaded foundry capacity. Second is rising average selling price (ASP). In the fourth quarter, more expensive wafers were produced in succession led by TSMC and foundries continued to adjust their product mix to increase ASP. In terms of changes in this quarter's top 10 ranking, Nexchip overtook incumbent DB Hitek to clinch 10th place.

TrendForce believes that the output value of the world's top ten foundries will maintain a growth trend in 1Q22 but appreciation in ASP will still be the primary driver of said growth. However, since there are fewer first quarter working days in the Greater China Area due to the Lunar New Year holiday and this is the time when some foundries schedule an annual maintenance period, 1Q22 growth rate will be down slightly compared to 4Q21.

United Microelectronics Corporation ("UMC" or "The Company"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced that its Board of Directors has approved a plan to build a new advanced manufacturing facility next to its existing 300 mm fab (Fab12i) in Singapore. The first phase of this greenfield fab will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 wafers with production expected to commence in late 2024.

The new fab (Fab12i P3) will be one of the most advanced semiconductor foundries in Singapore, providing UMC's 22/28 nm processes. The planned investment for this project will be US$5 billion. UMC has operated as a pure-play foundry supplier in Singapore for more than 20 years and the location is also the company's designated R&D center for advanced specialty technologies. To account for the Fab12i expansion, the company's 2022 capex budget will be revised upward to US$3.6 billion.

No-one seems to be immune to the current spat of component shortages and Even Upton from the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced that the 2 GB SKU of Raspberry Pi 4 will be going up in price, to its previous US$45 price point, from its current US$35. They will also bring back the 1 GB SKU of the Raspberry Pi until things settle down and it'll retail for $35.

They're also shifting their production priorities to be able to meet the demand of some products, as they're experiencing a fab allocation shortage on the 40 nm node on which the Raspberry Pi 3 SoCs are being made. As such, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ might end up in short supply, as the Raspberry Pi foundation will focus on its Raspberry Pi 3 and 3+ compute modules, as well as the Raspberry Pi 3B.