Foundry (electronic)

This article is relating to the manufacture of Semi-conducteur S (electronic chips).
Pour the foundry of metals, to see with Foundry

---- In Microelectronic industry , a foundry (English foundry) indicates a manufacturing unit of integrated circuits or electronic chips. One also usually indicates it under the name of fab (of English manufacture seedling ).

The heart of a fab resides in its Clean room, a zone where the environment is controlled to avoid any microphone-dust and where the least microphone Vibration is proscribed. The clean room is filled with very expensive equipment necessary to the many stages of manufacture of an integrated circuit starting from sections of semiconductor (generally of the Silicium) called Wafer. These stages are the Photolithographie, engraving, the doping, the diffusion and metallization.

Once all the stages carried out, the Wafer is cut out (sawing) and each chip is put out of case (the cases are generally out of plastic or ceramics). These stages there are not carried out in the fabs but in other types of factories dedicated to the assembly, which are definitely less expensive (usually called Back-End seedling ).

Evolution: the emergence of the companies of foundry

In the years 1980-90, the companies of manufacture of integrated circuits invested in their own manufacturing planies, even for low volumes of production. But today, the investment to build a fab of last generation is considerable and can reach more of the billion dollar (USD). Under these conditions, it is increasingly current to see emerging from the companies known as Fabless and the companies known as of foundry.

The companies Fabless do not have production equipments and sub-contract the manufacture of their chips at the companies of foundry. The founders do not sell chips, but Wafer S diffused. Sawing and the setting out of case are sub-contracted at other companies.

The largest founders are Asian:

Taiwanese TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.) and UMC (United Microelectronics Corp.) are most important (Bonds to be traversed: ,)
the Chinese like Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd or SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.) (Bond to be traversed: )

These companies of foundries do not sell integrated circuits directly, but of the Wafer S engraved. This is why they always do not appear in the classification of the first 20 manufacturers of semiconductors.

There thus exist three types of companies of semiconductors:

the manufacturers of integrated circuits who carry out themselves all the stages of the design to manufacture while passing by the sale of the chips (like American Intel, Texas Instruments or AMD, Europeans STMicroelectronics or Infineon or Japanese Renesas).
the companies Fabless which design and sell their chips, but sub-contract their manufacture with founders (like NVidia, ATI Technologies or Xilinx).
the companies of foundries which manufacture the Wafer S diffused starting from the design of their customer

Moreover, it becomes current to see manufacturers of integrated circuits to sub-contract part of their production at these companies of foundry. It is for example the case for Freescale, Philips or AMD which sub-contracts part of their production to founders like TSMC. Contrary, certain manufacturers of integrated circuits (as IBM Microelectronics) now propose services of foundry at companies Fabless.

See too

company Fabless
Manufactoring process of the transistors
the classification of the first 20 manufacturers of semiconductors with the passing of years

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