Foundry Ranking by Capacity 2013-2014

Each year, top foundries are ranked by their sales, and you probably don’t need the table below to know who’s first.

But what if we look at the top foundries from the capacity angle? Each of the top foundries holds several production lines that address different technology nodes and wafer sizes. Naturally, the goal is to sell 100% of the production capacity to reach revenue goals. Consider that increasing production capacity requires huge investments – indicating that a foundry believes in its ability to fulfill the expanded capacity and grow its revenues. So possibly, this could indicate if any of TSMC followers are closing the gap.

Source: IC insights

We took a look at the wafer capacity of four foundries: TSMC, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, UMC and SMIC, based on available data on their website. It would have been interesting to include Samsung’s too, yet data was not available.

Foundry Capacity Comparison

The 2013 capacity of each of the four foundries can be seen in the table and graph below.

Production capacity figures were all converted to 8-inch equivalent wafers in order to enable comparison.

TSMC Foundry Capacity

Total capacity of the manufacturing facilities managed by TSMC, including subsidiaries and joint ventures, reached 16.4 million eight-inch equivalent wafers in 2013. TSMC operates three advanced 12-inch wafer GIGAFAB™ facilities (fab 12, 14 and 15), four eight-inch wafer fabs (fab 3, 5, 6, and 8), and one six-inch wafer fab (fab 2). TSMC also manages two eight-inch fabs at wholly owned subsidiaries: WaferTech in the United States and TSMC China Company Limited, and its joint venture fab; SSMC in Singapore.

source: TSMC

GLOBALFOUNDRIES

GLOBALFOUNDRIES capacity is based on the fabs spread out in the US, Germany and Singapore.