Industry Insights

Price-hike signals in 2026 have spread from advanced compute and memory into 8-inch foundry services, select 12-inch mature processes, and power devices, with eefocus describing the repricing as structural rather than a repeat of the 2021 shortage.

The timeline: SMIC notified customers late last year of an ~10% increase on 8-inch BCD platforms; TrendForce's January survey found some fabs planning 5%-20% increases; and Chinese power-device vendors including CR Micro, Yangjie, Silan, NCE and MacroMicro announced February adjustments covering MOSFETs, IGBTs and related products.

Through mid-year, Infineon moved customers to new prices effective April 1, STMicroelectronics raised prices in March and again from June 28, and TrendForce's end-June survey showed ~5%-15% average increases on 8-inch foundry across the first half, with 5%-10% increases emerging on tight 12-inch mature nodes in Q2-Q3.

On the capacity side, TrendForce projects TSMC and Samsung will shrink 8-inch capacity faster than additions from SMIC and Vanguard can offset, leaving global 8-inch capacity down ~2.4% year-on-year in 2026.

A key driver is AI: AI server power chains are lifting demand for power management, gate drivers, MOSFETs, DrMOS and smart power stages — demand that runs on mature platforms rather than leading-edge logic.

Speaking at CIIF 2026's dedicated IC exhibition in Shanghai on October 12, Empyrean Technology chairman Liu Weiping said commercially deployable domestic EDA tools now cover about 85% of design needs, with nearly 10% at world-leading levels; process-node ecosystem coverage stands near 50% and is targeted at 80% this year.

Empyrean serves nearly 800 customers globally, including seven or eight of the world's top ten chip designers, with more than 6,000 chips designed using its tools.

Liu set three next-phase tasks for China's EDA: supporting indigenous advanced processes, adapting to new 'folded' circuit design methodologies that foreign tools will not support, and rebuilding tool efficiency with AI — where agentic EDA, he said, could change the shape of the entire industry.

At CIIF 2026 in Shanghai, Hua Hong Semiconductor chairman and president Bai Peng said the global IC market will cross US$1 trillion in 2026 — a year earlier than the previously forecast 2027 — driven by AI compute infrastructure and a memory rebound.

The mature-process (22nm and above) foundry market is expected to exceed US$60 billion in 2026, about 27% of global foundry, he said, with mature nodes growing around 6.8% annually — still a stable-growth market, not a shrinking one.

China's foundry capacity now accounts for one-third of the global total, expanding at over 10% CAGR versus 4-5% worldwide; Hua Hong aims to lift its specialty-process ASP ratio from 66% in 2024 to 76% by 2030, targeting 30%, 50%, 20%, 40% and 35% global foundry shares in eFlash, SPI NOR, BCD, CIS and discrete devices respectively by 2030.

Shenzhen-based Xianyi Microelectronics, which says it is China's first commercial magnetic-isolation chip company, has closed a Series A round worth tens of millions of yuan led by Xizhou International, and established its East China headquarters in Binhu, Wuxi.

The company says it built China's first commercial magnetic-isolation process line and now offers nearly 300 magnetic-isolation products across signal, interface, driver and power lines, with automotive products AEC-Q100 qualified and in volume supply for industrial and energy-storage applications.

The Wuxi base will serve as its East China R&D and support center, tapping the Yangtze River Delta customer cluster as demand grows in AI compute power infrastructure, solid-state transformers and embodied intelligence — areas where high-voltage isolation requirements are intensifying.

Four silicon carbide projects across China reported fresh progress this week, signaling continued capacity expansion in the third-generation semiconductor race.

Lips' Yangzhou SiC project, a provincial major project with total investment of 1 billion yuan (180 million yuan in phase one), will deliver its first phase — two automotive-grade SiC module packaging and testing lines with annual capacity of 1.5 million units — by year-end 2026; full build-out targets 3 million units per year.

Galaxy Microelectronics topped out the main structure of its Changzhou base on October 8 and expects trial production in Q2 next year; at full capacity it will produce 50 million IGBT and SiC power modules annually.

Xinjia Electronics said its fully automated automotive-grade SiC module line is already running at full load with 600,000 units of annual capacity, with products qualified into supply chains of leading domestic automakers; two more lines planned for next year would lift capacity to 1.5 million automotive-grade and 4 million industrial-grade units per year by late 2027 or early 2028.

Zhongyi Chuangxin reported its optical-grade SiC powder project — supplying semi-insulating SiC powder for AR glasses lenses — is 80% complete since construction began in June.