China Fab Boom Fuels Equipment Spending Revival

Dylan McGrath, EETimes, Mar. 16, 2017 – 

SAN FRANCISCO-Sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment grew 13 percent last year and are projected to grow further in each of the next two years in what would mark the first three-year period of consecutive growth for fab tools since the mid-1990s, according to the SEMI trade group.

Much of the growth in fab tool spending in 2016 and particularly anticipated growth in 2017 and 2018 is being driven by a projected boom in semiconductor fab building in China. Of the 62 front end fabs scheduled to begin operation globally between 2017 and 2020, 26 are in China, according to a fab-building tracking report issued by SEMI last year.

China's fab building boom has begun in support of the country's stated goal of beefing up its nascent domestic semiconductor industry to feed its massive internal electronics market. The Chinese government has said it will pump $161 billion over the next decade into building its domestic chip industry. International semiconductor powerhouses including Intel, Globalfoundries and TSMC are all building or expanding fabs in China, and a number of domestic Chinese firms are planning fabs, notably Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd., which has announced plans to spend $54 billion on two huge memory chip fabs in China.

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