At the beginning of this year, NXP, the leader in automotive electronic chips, launched the global microcontroller chip increase this year, and announced that it will increase the price of multiple product lines across the board since the previous quarter. Among them, the MCU will increase by 6%. The market expects May be out of stock for a whole year.

　　 Since last year (2017), many MCU manufacturers around the world have extended their product shipment lead times from four months to six months, and it is even rarer for Japanese MCU manufacturers to extend as long as nine months. According to Taiwan media reports, in the second half of last year, STMicroelectronics reported a significant increase in demand for automotive electronics and serious product shortages. Other IDM factories including Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP and other IDM factories also experienced the same situation, and the delivery date was delayed. In 3 months to half a year, many downstream customers transferred orders to Taiwan factories, and Nuvoton etc. benefited.

　　 STMicroelectronics’ out-of-stock products include 8-bit MCUs, Cortex M0/M3/M4, etc. The delivery period has been extended. The situation has not improved in the first quarter of this year. The industry believes that it will be difficult to improve in the first half of this year. In addition, Taiwan media pointed out that in 2018, Apple’s new iPhone will fully introduce 3D sensing. STMicroelectronics is one of the only suppliers and IDM factories will continue to squeeze out MCU production capacity.

　　 According to market semiconductor information, most of the global electronic product manufacturing operations last year were booming, and even Japanese semiconductor factories had not seen positive growth for many years, driving the sales of IC chips and other electronic components to rise. It is estimated that the global demand for automotive electronics and Internet of Things applications continues to erupt and grow. With the full capacity of silicon fabs, the global MCU market in 2018 may continue to face supply shortages throughout the year.

Liu Qing, a senior analyst at IHS Markit, said that some manufacturers and upstream Fabs (manufacturing plants) have begun to increase product supply capacity in the second half of 2017, but it still takes two or three quarters to fully release these new capacity. Therefore, The tight supply situation is expected to continue into the first half of 2018.