Although TSMC , Samsung and Intel are all focus on the development of 20nm process in 12-inch wafer fab, but the demands of 8-inch fab are very hot recently, mainly due to high-end mobile phones have been introduced into new applications such as fingerprint identification , and these related features all adopted 8-inch wafer foundry to produce ICs.

Especially TSMC, not only dominated high-end and low-end smartphones chips, but also the most comprehensive process foundry in 8-inch wafer fab, is the biggest winner of this 8-inch foundry boom. The UMC, VIS, Maxchip and other foundry vendors will also be filled to capacity.

Earlier speculated that foundry will use 12-inch wafer to manufacture new application chips, but in order to improve the yield, the last remained in 8-inch wafer.

Industry sources, fingerprint identification chip of Apple iPhone 5s will enter the peak demand in the first quarter, followed by the new iPad and iPad mini will also use a the same design, making 8-inch fab capacity utilization quickly pulled.

In addition, the low-end smart phone market began to grow, 4K2K TV providers also greatly increase the production of Ultra-High-Definition TV that driven the demand of power management IC and LCD driver IC to grow, micro-electro-mechanical components such as optical detector, accelerometer and image sensor also import orders in 8-inch fab.