The market for pure-play foundry supplied wafers at 40nm and larger geometry nodes is going to be flat in 2016 at $29.3 billion compared with $29.2 billion in 2015, the market researcher forecasts.
Pure-play foundry market by leading and trailing parts and 2015 versus 2016. Source: IC Insights.
Sales of ICs built using lower than 40nm process technology is forecast to rise 23 percent at pure-play foundries to reach $19.5 billion. This clearly favors pure-play foundries that can service the leading edge such as market and technology leader TSMC.
In 2016 54 percent of TSMC's revenue is expected to come from <40nm processing. For Globalfoundries the sales to come from <40nm production is forecast to be 52 percent.
Pure-play foundry sales by feature size. Source: IC Insights.
However, in this leading-edge category TSMC is six times larger than Globalfoundries with 2016 sales in category of $15.6 billion compared with $2.6 billion for Globalfoundries. This provides TSMC with 80 percent of the leading-edge pure-play foundry production. This is down from the 84 percent TSMC enjoyed in 2014 (see TSMC to grab 84% of leading-edge pure-play foundry market ).
The pure-play market is forecast to grow from $45.1 billion in 2015 to $48.8 billion, an increase of 8.2 percent.
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