Under the global inflation and economic downturn, when ADI's latest financial report was announced recently: the number of cancelled orders increased "slightly". As soon as the news came out, ADI led the decline in semiconductor stocks that day, and the stock price of rival Texas Instruments (TI) also closed sharply lower. Despite this, the demand from the analog manufacturers still exceeds the supply, and the revenue in emerging fields such as automobiles and communications is very strong. ADI has recently issued a price increase letter due to the skyrocketing cost of wafer manufacturing.

TI and ADI, as the global leader in die chips, have a combined global market share of more than 32% (TI 19%, ADI 13%), occupying a relatively important place in the Chinese market. In the analog chip spot market of TI and ADI, the price of general-purpose products has dropped sharply, and the order demand has dropped sharply, showing another appearance.

Today, the performance of the spot market is largely due to the foam component when the core was lacking before. Panic repeated orders and blind stocking once pushed up the market price of analog chips. Special chips such as automobiles and industrial control still maintain high demand. Affected by the sluggish consumer demand, the price of analog chips has fallen, showing a situation of "one cold and one hot".

Different from the attributes of analog chips, the well-known CPUs, mobile phone AP processors, SoC chips (such as Qualcomm Snapdragon), MCUs for large and small home appliances, etc., all have a unified name - digital chips. Digital chips are used for logic operation processing and control, digital signal encoding and decoding. With the rapid development of communication and image quality, the replacement is fast. Therefore, once demand surges or is sluggish, such as consumer electronics inventory is too low or too high, it will be affected. The influence of the mobile phone company also appeared quickly, just like the recent wave of slashing orders from major mobile phone manufacturers and laptop manufacturers.

Digital chips are experiencing a rare downturn. In fact, if it weren't for the lack of cores last year and the flood of speculation, the price plunged after the bubble burst, and analog chips would be more "resilient" for a long time.

The analog chip ASP (average retail price) is low and stable, and the certification period and life cycle are long. For example, an audio operational amplifier product from TI, which was launched in the 1970s and 1980s, is still on sale today, with a product life span of more than 40 years.

There are many kinds of analog chip products, and the downstream application fields cover almost all fields of life and production. In addition, the performance, life cycle, price, and performance of analog chips are relatively stable in all aspects. Therefore, the analog chip market is not easily affected by changes in the prosperity of a single industry. Compared with other types of chips, the price fluctuations are relatively small. As such, the analog chip market is seen as a "barometer" for the semiconductor industry.

Nowadays, the spot market of general-purpose analog chips (including power management chips) cannot support itself. Affected by the pressure of destocking in the consumer-grade application market such as mobile phones and panels, the spot market frequently reduces prices to digest inventory. This "barometer" issued Warning.

The drastic changes in market prices do not affect the continuous growth of analog chips. As an indispensable component of electronic products, the market size of analog chips continues to expand. According to IC insights, the global analog chip market will reach US$74.131 billion in 2021, with a year-on-year growth rate of more than 30%. In 2022, the analog circuit industry will still maintain a rapid growth momentum. It is estimated that the total global analog IC sales in 2022 will reach 83.2 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of about 12%. In the global analog chip market, there was a monopoly of established international manufacturers, and an emerging force that cannot be ignored is rising.