The Global semiconductor market was valued at US$ 554 billion in 2021, an increase of 26% percent from 2020. Analog segment was the major growth rate contributor, followed by Memory, and Logic. It is expected that the semiconductor market in 2020 will cross US$600 billion, primarily driven by the increasing semiconductor content across the end-user industries including automotive, consumer electronics, data centers, Industrial, Healthcare, Energy and Power etc.

The semiconductor manufacturing supply chain is complex with intellectual property originating in a few regions. Semiconductor capital equipment manufacturers and fab facilities are mostly concentrated Chin, East Asia, China, Taiwan, and US. Supplier dependency, environmental risks, political/governance change, economic instability, and geopolitical factors such as US current sanctions on China, and Ukraine and Russia War are some of the factors leading to supply chain issues in semiconductor industry.

Automotive industry is facing the biggest supply chain challenge as automobile manufacturers are facing issues including chip shortages, material availability, extended lead times etc. The average lead time, the gap between when a semiconductor is ordered and when it’s delivered has increased considerably to 28 weeks. The shortage in semiconductor due to supply chain issues has hampered the recovery post pandemic for automobile manufacturers and the Automotive OEMs have lost approximately USD 180 billion in sales in 2021.

The global semiconductor industry is committed to increase the overall semiconductor production capacity by either expanding their current fabrication facilities or investing in new ones. Supply chain members across the globe including semiconductor component manufacturers and government organizations are taking initiatives towards the development of semiconductor industry and ease supply chain issues. For instance, TSMC is planning to spend approximately US$ 44 billion to increase its production capacity by up to 47% this year. In 2021, the EU introduced the “2030 Digital Compass Initiative,” which explicitly set a goal of increasing the EU’s share of global chip manufacturing from 10% in 2020 to 20% by 2030.

Rising demand for high-performance and power efficient semiconductor ICs is leading to the investment in low process technology nodes (under 10 nm, mainly at 3 nm, 5 nm and 7 nm). Demand drivers include AI/ML, IoT, 5G, Blockchain, Robotics, intelligent edge, cloud computing, hardware accelerators etc.

Rise in digitalization, implementation of automation technologies, compute power at the edge of the network, demand for high reliability and low latency networks is creating the need to collaborate with supply chain partners not only identify supply chain issues but also to identify attractive, high growth opportunities in the semiconductor industry. Participants such as CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, semiconductor supply chain members can benefit from this unprecedented growth over the next five years.