Affecting Domestic Fabless Companies’ R&D Activities
The ongoing shortage of foundries in the global semiconductor industry is adversely affecting domestic fabless companies’ R&D activities. This is because it is becoming increasingly difficult to utilize multi-project wafers (MPWs) for prototype production.
South Korean company Key Foundry recently announced that it would not provide its MPW service for fabless companies starting from next year. Local foundries’ MPW services are becoming harder and harder to come by these days.
The MPW can be defined as a foundry service a fabless company uses for product R&D. Using the service, the company can produce various system chips on one wafer. The performances of the prototypes can be checked before mass production, which leads to risk and cost reduction.
The current situation is because foundries are extremely insufficient. Especially, eight-inch foundries are already fully booked until December next year and booking is almost impossible even with premiums. Foundries are trying to meet their orders by reducing their MPW lines, which do not lead to mass production.