Supply and demand of mature process capacity are tightening

Recently,the upward channel of semiconductor mature process wafer foundry quotation has been further confirmed by the industry.The strategy of the world's advanced chairman of TSMC publicly stated that artificial intelligence(AI)related applications are significantly stimulating the demand for mature processes.It is estimated that the average selling price(ASP)of wafer foundry will still maintain positive annual growth in 2027,and the increase range may exceed this year's level.Then,the foundries focusing on mature nodes,such as UMC and Lijidian,also released similar expectations one after another,and unanimously judged that the price center of mature process OEM will move up in a step-by-step manner in the next few years.This signal indicates that the mature process field is shifting from the early escape sequence to a new stage of dynamic balance between supply and demand,and a rationing game around 8-inch and part of 12-inch mature production capacity has quietly started in the semiconductor manufacturing side.
 

The industry usually simplifies the requirement of AI hardware to the increment of advanced logic chips,but the silicon content of a complete AI server system is far from being summarized by a single GPU.In a set of standardized high-performance AI computing nodes,besides the core accelerator,power management chip(PMIC),high-speed interface bridge chip,gate driver,microcontroller(MCU),temperature sensor and various analog front-end circuits are densely deployed.At present,the power consumption of mainstream 8-card GPU servers has exceeded 3kW,and some high-end models are close to 10kW,which puts severe constraints on the conversion efficiency,dynamic load response and fault protection mechanism of power supply architecture.In order to achieve higher power density and energy efficiency ratio,the multi-phase buck controller,intelligent power module and isolated gate driver on the server motherboard need to be iterated continuously,and the process optimization of such analog and mixed-signal devices often depends on fully verified mature process platforms rather than sophisticated nodes.This technical path determines that the demand for mature process is not a short-term pulse,but a structural increment accompanied by the expansion of AI computing power scale.

Keywords:mature process