Industry Expert Blogs

This has been a heated topic since Intel announced that it would open its manufacturing facilities to the fabless ecosystem more than a year ago. I for one think it is a colossal mistake and I'm not surprised that many others share this view. IDM’s offering of excess manufacturing capacity to semiconductor design companies started the fabless revolution so this is Deja vu all over again. Those same IDMs are now fabless, fab lite, or out of business. Right?

Intel’s first foundry customers made complete sense. Achronix and Tabula are emerging FPGA companies meaning Intel can closely control the flow of process information. Achronix was an equity investment using the ASIC model where Intel does all of the heavy lifting so the process recipe never leaves the building. Ditto for Netronome. Altera however is more the traditional foundry model and this is where Intel crossed the insanity line, absolutely.

Click here to read more ...