Real men have fabs... or do they?
"Real men have fabs." AMD founder Jerry Sanders made the point—in blunt, politically incorrect fashion—that maintaining control over IC manufacturing was crucial for a top-tier semiconductor company. The fabless semiconductor community heartily disagrees. In fact, proponents of the fabless business model often quote Sanders to highlight the folly of not following their strategy. Even Sander's own AMD eventually spun out its manufacturing capability with the "asset light" or "asset smart" strategy that led to the creation of Globalfoundries.
Except for Intel and the memory vendors, semicos who didn't take up the fabless or at least fab-light mantra were ridiculed. Process technology began to be viewed as commoditized and unable to provide a competitive advantage. Continuing down the integrated device manufacturer path was a sure path to bankruptcy. At least that became the conventional wisdom.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Flexible Pixel Processor Video IP
- Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 Digital IP
- Verification IP for Ultra Ethernet (UEC)
- MIPI SWI3S Manager Core IP
- Ultra-low power high dynamic range image sensor
Related Blogs
- Intel says fabless model collapsing... really?
- Foundry Model Busted: Will Apple Fab?
- Is Toshiba Going Fabless?
- Qualcomm, AMD head top 25 fabless IC suppliers for 2009; Taiwan firms finish strong!
Latest Blogs
- How is RISC-V’s open and customizable design changing embedded systems?
- Imagination GPUs now support Vulkan 1.4 and Android 16
- From "What-If" to "What-Is": Cadence IP Validation for Silicon Platform Success
- Accelerating RTL Design with Agentic AI: A Multi-Agent LLM-Driven Approach
- UEC-CBFC: Credit-Based Flow Control for Next-Gen Ethernet in AI and HPC