The use of Non-Linear Growth Models in predicting Fabless Wafer Demand

• Main Authors: Huang, Hui-Chi, 黃惠綺
• Other Authors: Huang, Jeng-Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/91879227242584207896

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理學院碩士在職專班管理科學組 === 99 === Semiconductor is well known as highly capital and technology intensive industry. Therefore, a reasonably accurate demand forecast modeling is vitally decisive factor for the success of a semiconductor company with owned wafer manufacturing capacity, especially for semiconductor foundry industry. In this thesis, we tentatively adopted “Non-linear growth curve prediction model”, a widely applied forecasting tool in variety industries while rarely chosen for semiconductor, as major methodology to forecast Fabless wafer demand to foundry industry. According to year 2002~2008 historical average ratio, source of foundry revenue consist of fabless (63%), IDM (Integrated Devices Manufacturer, 31%) and System Companies (6%). Therefore, a good forecast model for fabless has decided most of foundry wafer capacity requirements. This research focus on aggregate fabless companies’ wafer demand forecast. Firstly, we back traced global semiconductor annual revenues from 1980 to 2009, and corresponding annual fabless revenues from 1988 to 2009 to calculate annual fabless share or penetration rate of semiconductor. In the next, we applied three different non-linear growth curve models (Logistic, Gompertz and Extended Logistic), and four different measurement methods (Coefficient of Determination (R2), Sum Squares Error (SSE), Root Mean Squares Error (RMSE), and Mean Relative Error (MRE)), to assess fitting quality between actual and model. Then, we developed 5-year (2003~2009) and 10-year (2000~2009) forecasts based on historical period of 1988~2003 and 1988~1999 respectively. Finally, we applied Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) to measure predicting quality of this model. With discovery of the besting fitting model, we can better forecast fabless wafer demand forecast to foundry. Our key findings are: 1. Gompertz model is the best for semiconductor forecast, 2. Logistic model is the best for fabless penetration rate of semiconductor forecast. According to our findings, we can forecast global semiconductor revenue will reach US$345 billion in 2020, with 4% compound annual growth rate from 2009 to 2020. Also, Fabless revenue will reach US$91 billion in 2020 with surpassing compound annual growth rate of 5% in the same period, and this represents 37 millions of 8” equivalent wafers demand to foundry in 2020.