The automotive share of the whole IC market has by no means been larger than 9.0% whereas the communications share of the IC market peaked at 37.2% in 2013, in accordance with IC Insights. In 2020, the communications IC market was 4.7x the scale of the automotive IC market.
Driven by the worldwide explosion of smartphone demand, the communications market nearly doubled its share of the IC market from 18.5% in 1998 to 35.0% in 2020, IC Insights mentioned. Meanwhile, automotive’s marketshare elevated from 4.7% in 1998 to eight.7% in 2019 earlier than falling again to 7.5% throughout Covid-plagued 2020.
In many instances, automotive ICs signify solely a small portion of an IC provider’s whole gross sales, IC Insights famous. At TSMC, for example, automotive functions have by no means accounted for greater than 5% of its gross sales.
Producing automotive ICs doesn’t usually require modern expertise – many non-memory automotive ICs proceed to be manufactured on 200mm wafers – however it does require strict adherence to rigorous reliability and testing necessities and a dedication by the IC producer to provide a buyer’s lengthy lifecycle wants. It can be price noting that automotive IC end-users are infamous for being robust negotiators, oftentimes leaving slim margins for the automotive IC provider.
Despite the present automotive IC scarcity, the typical promoting worth for a lot of automotive IC merchandise has remained pretty fixed, IC Insights mentioned. For instance, the ASP for automotive application-specific ICs was US$0.96 in 2020 – 15% lower than the whole application-specific IC market ASP final 12 months – and solely US$0.95 within the first quarter of 2021.
Many IC business headlines have not too long ago targeted on the scarcity of automotive ICs, however given its comparatively small measurement, sturdy progress within the automotive phase is just not anticipated to considerably raise the expansion fee of the whole IC market this 12 months, IC Insights believes.
The automotive IC market is forecast to surge greater than 25% in 2021, after a 3% drop las 12 months, in accordance with IC Insights.
