Advantest Corp, one of the world’s major chip tester suppliers, yesterday said that the chip testing equipment market could regain growth this year, driven by rising demand for advanced testing services for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance-computing systems-on-chips and memory chips.
The frenzy of interest in ChatGPT and other AI-training applications has caused a surge in AI chip demand, but AI chip shipments have lagged due to supply constraints on advanced packaging capacity, Advantest Taiwan Inc chairman Alex Wu (吳萬錕) told reporters on the sidelines of the company’s annual media gathering in Taipei yesterday.
As the supply of advanced packaging capacity is set to improve this year, the volume of chips used in AI training systems and servers is also to increase, leading to growing demand for chip testing services and testing gear, Wu said.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said in October last year that it would more than double its advanced packaging or chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology capacity this year compared with 2023, with the aim of catching up with high demand from customers such as Nvidia Corp.
Growing AI use is pushing the limits of chip complexity and advanced packaging, boosting testing time and the demand for chip testers to guarantee performance and quality, Wu said.
“We are looking at growth this year for the global testing equipment market, in line with the projections of most market analysts,” Wu said.
The global chip-testing tool market is set to return to an annual expansion of 17 percent this year, or US$8.1 billion, Advantest said, citing TechInsights Inc’s projection.
The market was estimated to shrink 15.8 percent year-on-year to US$6.9 billion, TechInsights said.
Growth would also be fueled by rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth memory like DDR5 DRAM chips to support bigger data storage for AI inferencing, boosting testing services for such high-density and high-speed memory chips, Advantest said.
Additionally, Advantest is to benefit from the world’s race to build domestic chip supplies, it said. Since TSMC is expanding capacity overseas to Japan, the US and Europe, the chipmaker is likely to build more in-house chip testing capacity in Japan or Taiwan when the chip production scale expands, the company said.
Geographically, Asia remains the most active market, Wu said.
China has outpaced Taiwan and become the biggest market for Advantest since the second quarter of the company’s 2023 fiscal year. China accounted for 33 percent of the company’s revenue during the quarter, while Taiwan made up 16 percent, the company said.
Demand from China is huge, given that a large number of new chip manufacturing and outsourced semiconductor-assembly-and-test plants are scheduled to start operation in the following years, even though those chipmakers are concentrating on expanding mature chip technologies, rather than cutting-edge technologies, Wu said.
Advantest is following US chip export controls. The Tokyo-based testing equipment maker had a more than 50 percent share of the world chip testing equipment market.
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