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.
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