Denny McGuirk, President and CEO, SEMI

Denny McGuirk, President and CEO, SEMI

The recent update of the SEMI World Fab Forecast predicts that fab equipment spending will decline about 9% (to $32.5 billion) in 2013 (including new, used and in-house manufactured equipment). For most of the past 15 years, the industry has displayed a predictable pattern of fab equipment spending: two years of decline followed by two years of positive growth. In 2012 and 2013, the fab equipment market contracted, while 2014 and 2015 are expected to be positive.

The electronics industry's trend towards smaller and thinner products, especially for mobile devices, has ushered an era of significant changes in packaging technologies and form factors. Advanced packaging enables the integration of multiple functions encompassing computing, communication, and sensing in mobile products, and these technologies are major unit volume drivers for the overall semiconductor industry.

Semiconductor packaging materials are forecast to grow from $18.7 billion in 2013 on a global basis to almost $20.0 billion in 2017, according to the latest Global Semiconductor Packaging Materials Outlook (GSPMO) jointly published by SEMI and TechSearch International. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 1.3%. Excluding gold wire, CAGR increases to 3.6%.

Despite highly-evolved industry collaboration processes such as the ITRS, SEMI International Standards, and the growth of international research consortiums, major process milestones in lithography, wafer sizes, and new transistor architectures remain unclear and make coordinated industry planning more necessary than ever. SEMI (www.semi.org) continues to be involved in these important challenges in semiconductor manufacturing.