Fabless

As a fabless ( Engl. Fabricationless "fabriklos", "no production") to companies but especially designated no manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturers that do not have their own production facilities are equipped and foundries (contract manufacturers) such as GlobalFoundries , Samsung Semiconductor , UMC or TSMC depend.

This business model, which was developed by Gordon Campbell , the founder of Chips & Technologies , and Bernie Vonderschmitt , a co-founder of Xilinx , has the advantage that a company does not have to manufacture the chips and develop the necessary processes itself but can concentrate solely on developing the circuits . Fabless companies are particularly widespread at a time when it costs billions of euros to set up a semiconductor factory . The most important fabless companies belong to the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), which emerged from the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA). The GSA no longer only includes fabless companies , but companies from all areas of the semiconductor industry up to pure contract manufacturers.

Some integrated device manufacturers , i.e. semiconductor manufacturers with their own production , later outsourced them .

Well-known fabless companies of the present and the past:

3dfx 3DLabs Actel Ageia Altera ALi Allwinner Technology AMD ARM Limited ATI Technologies Broadcom Chips & Technologies Cirrus Logic Conexant Cyrix Dialog Semiconductor Imagination Technologies Ingenic Semiconductor Lantiq LSI Corporation Marvell Technology Group MediaTek

NeoMagic NexGen Nordic Semiconductor Nvidia PortalPlayer PowerDsine Qualcomm Qualcomm Atheros Realtek RMI Corporation Rockchip S3 Graphics SandForce SanDisk Silicon Integrated Systems Silicon Labs ULi VIA Technologies Wolfson Microelectronics Xilinx XMOS