Foundry

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The term foundry (also English silicon foundry ) refers to a company active in the field of microelectronics that manufactures products for other semiconductor companies in its semiconductor factories ( English semiconductor fabrication plans , short: “ fab ”), cf. Manufacturing plant . The term originally comes from English and means foundry .

background

With classic semiconductor manufacturers , also called IDM ( English integrated device manufacturer ), development and production are in one hand. Due to the ever increasing technical demands on production, the construction and commissioning of corresponding factories is becoming more and more capital-intensive. The creation of factories for semiconductor wafers ( wafer ) with usual today feature sizes in the lower nanometer range cost several billion euros. The operation is also no less complex and only profitable if the production facilities are well utilized, among other things due to the high cost pressure and price erosion in the industry. Few large companies can afford this effort to manufacture their own products.

The business model of a foundry enables companies to develop and sell highly specialized and competitive circuits without having to invest in their own factory. The integrated circuits are then mostly manufactured using standard technologies developed by foundries or their technology cooperation partners. Characteristic data of the components to be processed and layout guidelines are made available to the companies for development so that they can be used there for synthesis and simulation (see chip design ).

market

The largest pure ( English pure-play ) Foundries are the Taiwanese company TSMC and UMC . The European foundries include the German foundries X-FAB (including the former Altis-Fab in France) and LFoundry . Even IDM semiconductor companies as the Austrian ams AG offer some of foundry services.

The top-selling pure-play foundries in 2016

rank	company	country	2016 sales in USD million
01	TSMC		29,488
02	Globalfoundries		5,545
03	UMC		4,582
04th	SMIC		2,921
05	Power chip		1,275
06th	TowerJazz		1,249
07th	Vanguard (VIS)		800
08th	Huahong Grace		712
09	Dongbu Hitek		672
10	X-FAB		510

Individual evidence

1. ↑ X-Fab, SMIC and TowerJazz grew ≥30% in the last year. IC Insights. Evertiq, January 16, 2017, accessed February 1, 2017 .