From the Competition vs. Cooperation Relation of Semiconductor Foundry and IDM to Analyze Taiwan Foundry Strength and Strategy

• Main Authors: Chen, Chih-Yee, 陳奇奕
• Other Authors: Chung, Huimin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95410164790256313050

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理學院高階主管管理碩士學程 === 102 === At the early stage, semiconductor industry was presented in the form of IDM. IDM manages product design, manufacturing, packaging, testing and marketing together and own the whole required technologies. In order to build semiconductor industry, Taiwan government supports company to introduce semiconductor design and manufacture technology from USA started from IDM. But it becomes more difficult to operate semiconductor company due to technology, cost and marketing. In addition to do IC design and technology development, IDM encounters more challenge at building high cost factory to catch new generation technology. Along with the industry evolution and subdivision, the first foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), is formed to share the loading and manufacturing cost of IDM. This is not only benefit IDM, but also give a hand to Fabless that can grow rapidly. To see the success of TSMC, more foundries are formed one by one. With the rising cost of constructing factory and manufacturing, more pressure is pushing IDM to do transformation from IDM to Fab-lite or Fabless. They share loading or reply on Foundry capacity to reduce cost, then have resource focus on their specialities in the research and IC design to enhance competitiveness in the market. We can see this transformation is accelerating beyond 45nm technology. The most absorbing example is AMD split in 2009. One is Global Foundry that has Abu Dhabi fund investment, the other is AMD that is transformed to Fabless. Then Global Foundry merged Singapore Charted to become rank 2 Foundry in the world. The similiar case happens gradually. This has Foundry play more important role in the semiconductor market. The competition among Foundries become more severe. It attracts attention of IDM with leading technology to enter Foundry business. As the PC market downturn and not to catch the uptrend of mobile devices, Intel is facing problem of profit decline and growth in the semiconductor market. Intel is trying to be Foundry and actively seek customer to adopt her leading edge technology that wins one of TSMC customers, Altera. By the way, the system house and IDM, Samsung has already provided foundry service to Apple at semiconductor IC components since 2010. But Apple is trying to get rid of Samsung due to litigation of patent violation each other. Samsung is also actively looking for other customers to fill capacity and extend her foundry territory that can support her enterprise enlargement. These two IDM company, one is rank 1 technology and manufacturing leader in the world, the other is biggest company at mobile phone, memory, panels, etc. With two vigorous companies’ competition, how the Foundries in Taiwan to compete, especially TSMC. In order to maintain the leader position at Foundry, it is found that TSMC is increasing investment rapidly at leading edge technology research and building advanced factory to fulfill capacity demand from customers. TSMC aggressively forms “Grand Alliance” that includes customers, intellectual property and design service provider, EDA vendor, etc, to collaborate together. This can be powerful to compete with Intel and Samsung. Based on the strong partner relationship with customers and mutual trust each other, Taiwan Foundry is not only play as manufacturer, but also integrate frontend and backend to serve customer from design to shipment. The important competitive strategy is to have Foundry be transformed from manufacture to service.