Like Morris Chang, Robert Tsao also had a dream of creating a semiconductor foundry. Back when UMC was first founded though they had a harder time getting external contracts than TSMC due to the issues associated with IDM foundries and the small size of the fabless ecosystem at the time. As a result Mediatek was spun out and UMC became a pureplay foundry. This got me thinking about if UMC didn't spin out mediatek while continuing to focus on Tsao's dream of being a foundry, I wonder if we could have seen the Foundry+IDM model. In the typical IDM+foundry model the IDM's would historically sell excess capacity to fabless firms to ensure fabs had high utilization. In the modern day IDM+foundry seems more focused on achieving the necessary scale to continue justifying transistor scaling and amortize the ballooning R&D costs for new nodes.
For a hypothetical Foundry+IDM, foundry is the end goal rather than a means to an end/extra way to monetize the IDM's investments. In this situation IDM would be there to either initiate the yield learning curve, help ensure fab utilization is high, and or help build a better design/IP ecosystem. To do this while still preserving much of the spirt of pureplay foundries is difficult, but I have some ideas.
FPGAs are great products to initiate the yield learning curve due to their simplicity and linear benefit from node shrinks. It is also a small enough market that you might not step on customer's toes very much and can maybe bundle them in at cost with your foundries' PDKs.
ASICs have the benefit of being low volume enough to not steal much capacity and business from customers, but it might make many of those smaller ASIC customers avoid your foundry.
Licensing out core IP/ISAs could be an interesting way to jump start customer designs, and be a big value add over pureplay foundries (we will have to see how this shakes out for IFS to see how this works in practice though). Additionally this approach might be too expensive to do without also selling some of these CPUs yourself (potentially making you an IDM+foundry). You must also be cognisant that you don't force customers to use your ISA over what they want to use as this could push people away (intel custom foundry comes to mind here).
Expanding on the two points above maybe you could create a verity of designs and IP that get licensed out to customers. But once again this seems like a whole lot of work to put in without actually selling said chips.
With so many firms choosing to design ARM chips, maybe it makes sense to sell some ARM SOCs. This obviously risks burning many of your potential customers, but given how off the shelve many ARM designs are, maybe this isn't that big of a concern. If nothing else this approach would be great for improving yield learning and your design ecosystem for ARM chips.
While I am skeptical that in practice Foundry+IDM would be a competitive with the pureplay or IDM+foundry models, it was certainly interesting to think about. Any thoughts on how the IDM part would look and how big it would be for this hypothetical business would be appreciated.
For a hypothetical Foundry+IDM, foundry is the end goal rather than a means to an end/extra way to monetize the IDM's investments. In this situation IDM would be there to either initiate the yield learning curve, help ensure fab utilization is high, and or help build a better design/IP ecosystem. To do this while still preserving much of the spirt of pureplay foundries is difficult, but I have some ideas.
FPGAs are great products to initiate the yield learning curve due to their simplicity and linear benefit from node shrinks. It is also a small enough market that you might not step on customer's toes very much and can maybe bundle them in at cost with your foundries' PDKs.
ASICs have the benefit of being low volume enough to not steal much capacity and business from customers, but it might make many of those smaller ASIC customers avoid your foundry.
Licensing out core IP/ISAs could be an interesting way to jump start customer designs, and be a big value add over pureplay foundries (we will have to see how this shakes out for IFS to see how this works in practice though). Additionally this approach might be too expensive to do without also selling some of these CPUs yourself (potentially making you an IDM+foundry). You must also be cognisant that you don't force customers to use your ISA over what they want to use as this could push people away (intel custom foundry comes to mind here).
Expanding on the two points above maybe you could create a verity of designs and IP that get licensed out to customers. But once again this seems like a whole lot of work to put in without actually selling said chips.
With so many firms choosing to design ARM chips, maybe it makes sense to sell some ARM SOCs. This obviously risks burning many of your potential customers, but given how off the shelve many ARM designs are, maybe this isn't that big of a concern. If nothing else this approach would be great for improving yield learning and your design ecosystem for ARM chips.
While I am skeptical that in practice Foundry+IDM would be a competitive with the pureplay or IDM+foundry models, it was certainly interesting to think about. Any thoughts on how the IDM part would look and how big it would be for this hypothetical business would be appreciated.
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