Foundry Future: Challenges in the 21st Century

Foundries are now an integral part of the overall semiconductor supply-chain, and there is every reason to anticipate that the importance of the foundry segment to the IC industry will increase further. Continued IC-industry growth will depend on the sustained growth of the foundry segment, and, here, we have outlined the key strategies needed to propel this growth. We believe that foundries must expand into new CMOS-logic IC-product markets. But, foundries must also penetrate segments of the IC market that are currently not involved in foundry relationships, by broadening the range of technologies that are offered. In the future, therefore, foundry-market leaders such as TSMC will provide an increasingly broad portfolio of CMOS-derived technologies (such as, RF, mixed-signal, high-voltage, non-volatile-memory, embedded- DRAM, for example) concurrently with the design environment necessary to address issues in memory, analog, high-performance logic, or image-sensor applications.