The Chip Industry

This picture summarizes the different roles for various companies in the semiconductor market.

There are 5 parts which are chip design, equipment, fabless, foundry and IDM.

IDM stands for integrated device manufacturer and are the companies that do design, manufacturing and selling.

The foundries, which are the manufacturers of chips, currently have one of the biggest roles in the industry today because there are so few foundries and they are so concentrated in one area of the globe.

The fabless companies design their chips but don't make them; instead they contract a foundry to produce them and that foundry is most often TSMC.

A lot more attention has been focused toward the semi-industry due to geopolitics and because of the huge role that semis have in our daily lives today since so much of the tech that we use and will be using in the future has semi-chips in them (computers, phones, autonomous cars, TVs, robots and many others).