Semiconductor revenue is expected to grow 7.7 percent in 2018 to $450 billion against 24 percent growth achieved in 2017, according to an IDC report.
Semiconductor revenues will achieve 2.9 percent CAGR from 2017-2022, reaching $482 billion in 2022.

The memory market was the key story of last year, due to strong demand, limited supply, and product mix constraints.

The DRAM memory market grew 77 percent to $73 billion last year. On the other hand, the NAND memory market rose 52 percent to $49 billion. Samsung replaced Intel as the largest semiconductor company in 2017.

Excluding DRAM and NAND, the overall semiconductor market grew 12 percent year over year.

Non-memory semiconductors are forecast to grow $11 billion to $302 billion in 2018. Both DRAM and NAND will continue to grow this year, but are expected to decline from 2019-2021 before recovering slightly in 2022.

IDC said the strong memory market resulted in Samsung capturing the top semiconductor manufacturer spot away from Intel and raised the profile of all the memory manufacturers, which now represent three of the top five semiconductor companies compared to only two the previous year.

“The pace of change and technology is expected to accelerate as machine learning and autonomous systems enable a more diverse set of architectures to address the opportunity. This will fuel the engine of growth for semiconductor technology over the next decade,” said Mario Morales, program vice president, Semiconductors at IDC.

The automotive market will be growing at a 9.6 percent CAGR, while the industrial markets will be growing at a 6.8 percent CAGR from 2017-2022.

Semiconductor revenue forecast

Semiconductor revenue for the computing industry segment will decline 4 percent this year and will show a negative CAGR of -0.7 percent for 2017-2022. Computing SSDs will be growing in high double digits, while enterprise SSDs will be growing at 9.8 percent CAGR  for 2017-2022.

Semiconductor revenue for the mobile wireless communications segment will grow at 5.5 percent this year with a CAGR of 5.8 percent for 2017-2022.

Semiconductor revenue for 4G mobile phones will achieve an annual growth rate of 10.9 percent in 2018 and a CAGR of 3.1 percent for 2017-2022.

5G will drive growth in the later part of the forecast as the mobile technology becomes mainstream by the middle of the next decade.

Communications infrastructure semiconductors are forecast to grow at a 1.7 percent CAGR from 2017-2022 with the strongest growth coming from consumer networks.