OEM, in the field of integrated circuits, refers to the manufacturer responsible for manufacturing chips. Foundry originally meant foundry, foundry and glass foundry. From its literal meaning, we can see its connection with integrated circuits, because the manufacture of silicon integrated circuits is also related to "glass" and "sand".
Fabless, the combination of manufacturing and less, refers to an operating mode of integrated circuit design that "has no manufacturing business and only focuses on design". It is also used to refer to an IC design company without a chip manufacturing factory, which is often referred to as "fabless" for short (wafer is the basis of chip \ silicon integrated circuit, and without wafer, there is no chip manufacturing); Generally speaking, IC design house (IC Fabless.
Contact and difference
There are several familiar words in the electronics industry: IDM (integrated design and manufacturer), which refers to the model that should be taken care of from design to manufacturing. Previously, large companies in the industry were generally typical IDM manufacturers; OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) refers to the cooperation mode of brand, design, sales and production, commonly known as "OEM" and "OEM"; ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) is a manufacturer, which not only undertakes the main responsibility of manufacturing, but also designs some products by itself. From the manufacturer's point of view, the difference between these modes lies in the degree of participation in design and development, whether it is pure production or equal emphasis on production and design or brand and sales.
The reason why there are these models is that the division of labor in modern society is becoming more and more detailed. Brand, intellectual property, design and development, manufacturing, procurement, logistics and after-sales service all have their own specialties, involving technical ability and social resource allocation. Manufacturers should choose what they can do and are good at. The same is true of the integrated circuit industry. On the one hand, IC design is highly technical and needs deep accumulation; On the other hand, IC manufacturing equipment has huge investment, long cycle and very experienced management. So they gradually divided into two factions: those with production lines and those without production lines. Foundry is a manufacturer of semiconductor chips, commonly known as "foundry"; Fabless is an IC design company without its own production line. Both of them have high technical content in integrated circuits, but their division of labor is different. The former focuses on manufacturing, while the latter focuses on design. Of course, there are also IDM companies with both design and manufacturing capabilities, such as Intel and Samsung. However, due to the high cost and pressure of semiconductor chip process upgrading and maintenance, many IDM manufacturers have abandoned Foundry's operation and adopted the fabless mode or fabry mode between them, that is, the "light wafer" mode, such as Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Division), NXP (Philips Semiconductor Division) and Infineon (Siemens Semiconductor Division). Only analog IC is closely related to technology because of its design process and performance, and more IDM companies keep their own production lines. In terms of digital IC, most companies have turned to the factory-free mode, and the OEM share has gradually concentrated in a few. At present, only TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC and SMIC are the main "OEM" manufacturers. Obviously, many IC companies with pure design can't and don't need to touch the production process of IC. So today, when the industry talks about IC design, most of them refer to the fabless mode, especially the digital IC design.