Wafer fabs Lord It Over Fabless Rivals
by David Manners, Electronics Weekly
Wednesday 12 May 2004
electronicsweekly.co.uk
The fabless/foundry semiconductor business model is at risk of being swamped by the greater efficiency of their fab-owning rivals, the traditional semiconductor manufacturers.
"For fabless companies - if they are not fully supported - it might be very difficult," Hideo Inayoshi, senior vice president and board director at Renesas Technology, told the Future Horizons IEF 2004 conference in Prague last week. "If many companies support the fabless industry then it might be alright but, in my view, it will be difficult."
One problem for the fabless/foundry model is that, at finer geometries, miss-matches between design and foundry capabilities can prove disastrous to yield while foundry capabilities are constantly changing.
Designers at integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) can make allowances for limitations in the process, whereas designers at fabless companies may not have the information to do so.
Another problem is that the performance limitations imposed by power density levels mean that simply buying the process tools for a new generational node does not give automatic performance benefits from a shrink. Most of the benefit has to come from innovations which are best achieved by the IDMs.
A third problem for foundries is that the lithography enhancement 'tricks' used by manufacturers have major implications for designers which are also better resolved in the close-coupled design/manufacturing environment of IDMs.
IBM has said the industry's overall first-time-right rate on 0.13µm is 50-60 per cent, but is only 5-10 per cent in foundries.
Susumu Kohyama, corporate senior v-p at Toshiba, told the conference: "A lot of foundry companies are trying to improve their design model and work with IDMs and EDA companies. I think the IDM model and the fabless/foundry model will co-exist."
Some pooh-pooh the predictions of the demise of the fabless/foundry model. "Good fabless companies create good design flows," argued Tensilica CEO Chris Rowen. "I would say Broadcom, Xilinx, Altera and Qualcomm have actually done OK." |
