Subject: Cleanroom market brightens
There are 25 wafer fabs online that can process wafers of 300-mm diameter, and when ramped to full production, they would have an aggregate manufacturing capacity of 400,000 wafer starts per month. But this is just the beginning. This is the wave of the future and lots of suppliers will be forced to retire their existing 200-mm facilities and build new plants.
Other electronic sectors are going to be spending more on cleanrooms. Flat panel display manufacturers already operate some of the biggest cleanrooms in the world. Sharp Corp. is considering increasing production capacity at its new liquid-crystal-display panel plant in Japan this year. The company expects the global LCD TV market to jump to twelve million units in the year ending March 2006 from its estimate of three million units for the year through March 2004.
Many market forecasters expect MEMs to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent to 20 percent over the next four to five years. MEMs devices can now be found in many consumer sectors like digital and projection TVs, home theaters, video games, and, of course, automotive electronics. Another sector with a large MEMs penetration, medical electronics, uses millions of disposable MEMs blood-pressure sensors. There are even larger consumer opportunities involving DVD and CD players, gyros for stabilizing camcorders, and MEMs microphones and hearing aids.
The U.S. is losing market share in some cleanroom sectors but not in biotechnology. The U.S. biotechnology market is divided into two distinct groups – a top tier of big companies led by Amgen and Genentech that increasingly behave like the traditional pharmaceutical majors, and the rest of the industry, comprising hundreds of smaller companies. As these companies move from research to production, the cleanroom investment multiplies greatly.
Cleanrooms: World Markets is an online report with forecasts of hardware, clothing, and services. It is continually updated. For more information on this report click on: Cleanrooms: World Markets http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/cleanroom.html .
Individual projects in each country are tracked in World Cleanroom Projects. For samples click on: http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/cleanroom.html#80A .
Bob McIlvaine
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