Many semiconductor companies have become conservative in their expectations under the intensification of the Sino-US trade war. However, TSMC has issued an optimistic forecast for the outlook of 7nm process revenue over the next few years, up to $10-12 billion.

The prices of small capacity NAND flash memory products are bouncing back recently. Specifically, memory cards with 8/16GB capacity and USB flash disk are rising. The average prices of 120GB SSD in the third quarter is at a record low of $24.

Samsung announced the first consumer QLC SSD in the industry, which has SATA interface and a maximum 4TB capacity, using fourth generation V-NAND and 64-layer 3D stacking. It has higher quality and lower prices compared with QLC flash memory.

TSMC predicts there will be more than 100 kinds of chips based extreme ultraviolet lithography taping out. In addition, its major accouts include Huawei, Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA and Xillinx. 7nm will help TSMC set a new record of $12 billion revenue in the fourth quarter after recording in the third quarter.

Most of China's current semiconductor chips rely on imports, and most of which are from Korea. Korean companies have accounted for 75% of the global DRAM memory chip market share, and due to technical limitations, China is still trying to narrow the gap with Korea.

With the advent of the DT era, data is growing exponentially so that SSD can no longer meet enterprise storage requirement. Therefore, the obsolete tape, together with HDD to be eliminated, perhaps re-enters storage market under the excavation of big data.

According to the latest data released by DRAMeXchange, the revenue of global NAND flash memory industry in the third quarter of 2018 reaches $17 billion, increased by 4.4% compared with last quarter. The prices of flash memory chip reduce by 10-15%. Samsung may slow down the renewal of flash memory processes in 2019.

Two Chinese enterpises, YMTC and SIMC , order two high-end mask aligners about $17.7 million from ASML in order. As the most advanced mask aligner, EUV is the only equipment to produce the processing below 7nm.

In addition to Samsung and Micron, SK Hynix also announces mass production of 1Ynm 16 Gb DDR5-5200 memory in 2020. At that time, share of DDR5 memory will increase on the entire memory chip market, completing the mission of counterattack DDR4.

According to the president of Transcend, there are glut both in DRAM and NAND flash memory industry, and DRAM prices still have space to fall in the next year or a longer period. Compared with NAND flash memory are, there are fewer suppliers in DRAM area, so the falling price trend of DRAM will be more moderate than NAND flash memory chips. Startups in mainland China had little chance to have a p...