Perhaps you have been know of Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Qualcomm, Nvidia.
But, do you know that there is one company serve as major foundry fab for these company?
In old days, there is a lot of companies who design and manufacture chips themselves.
This is what we call as integrated device manufacturer. At industry where internse competition in terms of price, the issue raised when the manufacturing line is not fully utilized.
At year 1987, first foundry fab in the world founded by an taiwanese engineer which aged 56, and with a clear direction that the company only manufacture chips with received customer design.
They do not design chip for customer. Today, this company serve about 449 customers globally. Thus, what makes them thrive across the years?
1 High entry of barrier
At the semiconductor industry where technology advance at very fast pace, transistors with smaller size are required to fit into a single chip.
Being manufacture these chips require cutting edge machine which cost billions, it create barrier for new foundry fab player to get into competition with high capital cost requirement.
2 Never made own brand
Being a foundry fab leader, you are competing with your customer if you produce own branded products.
The company cooperate with all customers in producing chips that they looking for, win-win scenario.
3 Trust from customer
When Apple design new product, do you think it will handover the design to Samsung or foundry fab?
With Samsung being a competitor, is it reliable and trustable for Samsung to help manufacture chips for Apple?
Throughout continuous technology breakthrough in transistor node, chip produced resulted in smaller packed transistor, faster in computing performance and battery saving device.
Looking on the process technology roadmap below, the pure play foundry fab TXXX seems lagging behind at early years, but eventually leading the edge processes on latter years. With this, it is foresee the company will thrive in coming years.
