foundry

A foundry is the manufacturing layer of the semiconductor industry, turning customer chip designs into wafers through a controlled sequence of lithography, deposition, etch, implant, metrology, and yield-learning steps. **The industry exists because design and manufacturing scaled apart.** A fabless company can focus on architecture, RTL, verification, software, and markets while a foundry absorbs the capital intensity of process technology and factory operations. That separation made modern chip startups possible, but it also made capacity allocation and foundry access strategic constraints. | Industry role | Main responsibility | Examples | |---|---|---| | Fabless designer | Defines the chip and owns the product | NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, many startups | | Foundry | Manufactures wafers from customer layouts | TSMC, Samsung Foundry, GlobalFoundries, UMC | | OSAT | Packages and tests finished die | ASE, Amkor, JCET and others | | EDA and IP | Supplies tools, libraries, and reusable blocks | Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Arm | **The foundry industry is therefore both enabling and constraining.** It lets design companies avoid owning fabs, but it also concentrates the most difficult manufacturing steps inside a small number of suppliers.