Aixtron purpose of this thread

Erste Seite:
Conference Call Participants

Olivia Honychurch - Liberum

Uwe Schupp - Deutsche Bank

Jürgen Wagner - Stifel

Stephane Houri - ODDO

Andrew Gardiner - Barclays

Charlotte Friedrichs - Berenberg

Malte Schaumann - Warburg Research

Harald Schnitzer - DZ Bank

Lee Meyer - Lord, Abbett

Und noch weiter habe ich noch gesehen :
David O'Connor from Exane BNP Paribas.

Wer immer noch Zweifel hat ob Cree - Aixtron Kunde ist möge dies bitte lesen und interpretieren.

Aus dem Cree - CC

We have more to share on these efforts over the next several months and expect the name change to be complete sometime in the next few quarters. Our 200-millimeter team has made solid progress, and in fact, has made substantial breakthroughs in 2020. As a result, we have decided to forgo our original plan to initially open up the Mohawk Valley Fab at 150 millimeters. And instead, we’ll begin ramping Mohawk Valley directly with 200-millimeter silicon carbide substrates in the first half of calendar ‘22, establishing the world’s first 200-millimeter silicon carbide fab and further differentiating us from the competition.

Aus dem Aixtron - CC

David O'Connor

Okay. Okay. No, that's helpful. And then maybe just for my last question on the silicon carbide side. One of your customers recently announced the move to 8-inch SiC wafers. Does that change in any way how other customers think of their silicon carbide road map? And can this in any way help you crack some of these other customers?

Felix Grawert

Yes. That's a very good question. So this is a very interesting trend in the market. Initially, the focus of the entire industry was on silicon carbide 6-inch. Now everybody sees that especially in the last 1, 1.5 years, the plan of all the car OEMs worldwide towards electrification has significantly accelerated. I think we are now clear, everything will become electric. It's just a question of when it becomes electric. And we have also seen in the last one-year that all the car OEMs are significantly pulling in their time line for electrification. I think that was a major change that we saw in the automotive industry in the year 2020.

And with that, now for the semiconductor industry, it also becomes very clear that very soon, there will be very significant volume of MOSFET for the drivetrain of all these electric vehicles. And this has now put a push on the faster and 8-inch adoption because for the adoption of 8-inch, a new wafer size, the market needs to be big enough. And suddenly, throughout the year of 2020, the expectations on that market have become big enough. And with that, customers are now pulling in the conversion from 6-inch to 8-inch. It was initially planned around 2024, 2025. And many customers are now talking about the adoption 1 to 1.5 years earlier than that.

So the adoption will be somewhere between 2022 to 2024. That creates now a new dynamic. Everybody is now starting to make that plan for the 8-inch transition. And here, AIXTRON has a unique position and we believe, as you have indicated in your question, that we can exploit that as our clear strategy to exploit that because in our Planetary equipment, we typically also in gallium nitride, can both load 6-inch wafers and 8-inch wafers. The reactor furniture needs to be a little bit retrofit. It's a small kit, costs like €100,000, €200,000. I mean it's a small fraction of the total price of the tool and then the tool can be retrofitted.

And with this, we are currently now working on, let me say, revision of our tools, which is both 8-inch and 6-inch capable. We had in first discussions with customers on the tool, actually first customers have purchased the tool already. We plan to ship it early in 2022, standing already on our shop floor here. And that tool will then be both 6- and 8-inch capable. And it will give us an additional value proposition and an additional angle to approach and address more customers or to crack into those customers where we are not a tool of record yet. That's clearly part of our strategy.

6 inches = 150mm
8 Inches = 200mm

Gruß
 baggo-mh

U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order last
week to review the country’s supply chains for semiconductors
and other products. While there aren’t expected to be any quick
fixes, industry watchers say the long-term trend is clear: more
equipment will be needed.
“The semiconductor industry is running on all cylinders,
and you’re seeing companies that might in the past have been
reluctant to commit to capex (capital expenditures) now all of a
sudden trying to ramp up as quickly as they can,” said Daniel
Morgan, a senior portfolio manager with Synovus Trust Co., which
owns shares of Applied Materials.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which produces
chips for Apple and Broadcom Inc., plans to spend $12 billion to
construct a plant in Arizona. Some of the costs for that
facility were included in the company’s capital spending plans
for 2021 that sparked a rally in chip related stocks around the
world in January. Broadcom’s capital outlays could total as much
as $28 billion, up from $17 billion in 2020.
Huge manufacturers like Taiwan Semi building smaller plants
in new regions creates particularly attractive opportunities for
Applied Materials, Chief Executive Officer Gary Dickerson said
on the Santa Clara, California-based company’s earnings call
last month.
“You have to look at the scale of the factories they’re
building and at least what’s been announced is smaller scale,”
he said. “That somewhat less efficient factory size is a
positive for Applied.”
In addition to Applied Materials, top picks for Cowen’s
Sankar include Lam Research and MKS Instruments Inc.
“You have an environment where demand is very strong,
supply is constrained and then you add to it domestic supply
build out,” the analyst said in an interview. “At some point
these things will normalize, but it won’t be any time soon.”