"This owes largely to the sustained IC demand for commercial models, the advancement in 7nm process, and a considerable growth in memory IC market," said Chris Hung, senior industry consultant and Deputy General Director at MIC.

Chris Hung said: "Therefore, Taiwan's semiconductor is expected to grow steadily in 2018. While the memory IC industry is to witness an exponential growth of 25% compared to 2017, the fabless IC industry is estimated at 6.2% and the packaging and testing industry at 8.3%. What is noteworthy is that fabless IC designers are expanding service coverage to include ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). For instance, MediaTek starts to provide ASIC services for its clients like Cisco and Sony."