Vai dal Barbieri: Semiconductors, the technological heart of progress

In recent years, the global semiconductor market has assumed a crucial role in the world economy, reaching values between $500 billion and $600 billion. After a peak of $600 billion in 2021, 2023 marked a slight decline with sales of $534 billion. However, forecasts for 2025 are optimistic, with an estimated growth of 16.18 percent that will bring the market to a value of $624 billion. This trend reflects the continued expansion of an industry critical to technological innovation.
The market is dominated by key players such as NVIDIA, which reported sales of $35.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024, consolidating its leadership in artificial intelligence. It is followed by Samsung Semiconductor with $22 billion and Broadcom with $14 billion, while Intel and SK Hynix round out the top players. These numbers demonstrate the concentration of the market in the hands of a few global leaders.

Designers, known as fabless companies, focus exclusively on chip design, delegating manufacturing to specialized foundries. They use advanced electronic design (EDA) tools to develop sophisticated layouts, tailoring them to customers' specific needs. Qualcomm leads the mobile device chip segment, while NVIDIA dominates the GPU market and AMD competes with Intel in CPUs. These companies are the creative minds of the industry, translating technological needs into innovative products.

Foundries are the semiconductor factories, responsible for the physical production of chips designed by fabless companies. They invest billions of dollars in infrastructure and cutting-edge technologies, such as advanced lithography processes, to make smaller and more powerful chips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) dominates the market with a share of more than 50 percent, while Samsung Foundry and GlobalFoundries play significant roles, helping to ensure global supply.

IDMs, or integrated device manufacturers, manage the entire manufacturing process in-house, from design to production. This model provides total control over the production chain, allowing them to optimize designs for their own manufacturing processes. Intel, for example, is an undisputed leader in the PC and server CPU segment, while Samsung operates both as an IDM and as a third-party foundry service provider, demonstrating extraordinary versatility.

OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) companies handle the final stages of the production cycle. They receive silicon wafers from foundries, cut individual chips, assemble them into protective packages, and perform rigorous testing to ensure quality and reliability. ASE Technology is a major player in this segment, with plants strategically located in Asia.

Semiconductor manufacturing machinery companies play an essential role in the industry, developing advanced equipment for all stages of the manufacturing process. Every chip we use, from the simplest to the most complex, owes its existence to a number of innovative technologies designed by these players.
ASML dominates the market thanks to its monopoly in the production of EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machines, which are indispensable for making next-generation chips with advanced technology nodes. These machines make it possible to create components with extremely small dimensions, supporting the evolution toward increasingly powerful and compact devices.
Applied Materials, another industry giant, provides equipment for material deposition and wafer processing, while LAM Research stands out for its plasma etching solutions, which are essential for defining microscopic structures in chips. Tokyo Electron, with an established presence in the Asian market, offers a wide range of semiconductor manufacturing machinery, covering different stages of the manufacturing process.
These suppliers invest heavily in research and development, continuously pushing technological limits. Their contribution is crucial not only for current production, but also for the future of the industry, where miniaturization and energy efficiency are crucial challenges.

As a technology company focused on artificial intelligence, we closely observe hardware and software developments, aware that the performance of AI models is increasingly dependent on high-capacity, high-bandwidth memory solutions. In this context, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has emerged as a key technology to meet increasing computational demands, especially in large language models (LLMs).
The current generation HBM3E offers speeds in excess of 1 TB/s and improved power efficiency by 2.5 times over previous versions. These features make it essential for high-performance AI applications. The future with HBM4 promises further innovations, including a doubling of data rates through increased I/O terminals and advanced manufacturing techniques.
The next evolutionary step is HBM4 memory, which promises significant speed and capacity improvements by doubling I/O terminals to 2,048 and integrating up to 16 layers, but increasing manufacturing challenges such as higher wafer consumption and stack height to 775 μm. To overcome these challenges, SK Hynix and Samsung are adopting advanced 3 nm and 4 nm processes and innovative techniques such as Non-Conductive Film (NCF) and Hybrid Copper Bonding (HCB). Mass production is expected in the second half of 2025.
The entire technology landscape related to HBM memory is shaping up to be an indispensable pillar for the evolution of artificial intelligence and advanced applications. These developments not only define future technology standards, but also represent an opportunity to anticipate the needs of a rapidly expanding industry.
HBM memory is not only a technological building block, but a strategic element to support innovation and competitiveness in a crucial sector for the global economy and technological development.

The global semiconductor supply chain is a highly interconnected system in which each segment plays a critical role in transforming designs into finished products. The required specialization and colossal investments consolidate the dominance of a few players, making this industry one of the most unique and competitive in the world.