The market for microcontrollers (MCUs) in automotive applications is growing at an unexpectedly rapid pace this year. In the course of the current economic recovery, it is growing by 23% to 7.6 billion dollars. This is set to continue at 14% in 2022. This will be followed by 16% in 2023. The reliable US market researcher IC Insights came to this very positive conclusion in July 2021 in its Mid-Year Update of the McClean Report "Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry".
This is a turn for the better for automotive MCUs, which account for a significant 40% of total MCU sales. IC Insights attests to their volatile development in recent years: after a solid increase of 12% in 2017, the market grew by just 1% in 2018. Sales of new vehicles stagnated in 2019. Then came the coronavirus economic downturn in summer 2020. Then came the weather-related closures of wafer fabs in Texas and Japan in spring 2021, which made it correspondingly difficult to restart IC production, especially in the affected 200 mm wafer fabs. The result: production stops at car manufacturers too. Now the world's leading Taiwanese contract manufacturer TSMC wants to significantly increase its production capacity for automotive MCUs in the third quarter: by 30% above the pre-pandemic level of 2019.
Infotainment systems account for a relatively small share of automotive MCU sales (10% or USD 780 million), albeit with a sharp increase of 59% in 2021. Microcontrollers in engine control units, transmissions, brakes, steering, window regulators, battery management, etc. currently account for the lion's share of sales at 90%.
More than three quarters of sales of automotive MCUs relate to 32-bit designs. This amounts to 5.8 billion dollars this year, followed by 16-bit designs with 1.3 billion dollars. The modest remainder are 8-bit MCUs (441 billion dollars). Due to the tight supply situation, the average selling prices (ASP) for 32-bit MCUs will rise by 13% this year, according to IC Insights.
