• • • SUPPLEMENT • • •


FAB INDEPENDENCE:


UNDERSTANDING SUPPLY CHAIN RISKS BEYOND THE DATASHEET


with strong design capability and good customer relationships, but with production concentrated in a single foundry in a single geography. This model produced excellent chips. The issue


BY BRAM DE MUER, CEO, ICSENSE STAND H22


semiconductor manufacturing was a logistical question, not a strategic one. That assumption has changed. The supply


F


disruptions of 2020–22 made the problem visible; the shift underneath them is permanent. The factors driving it; trade policy fragmentation, tightening export controls and the concentration of advanced manufacturing capacity in a small number of locations, are structural, not cyclical. What is less well understood is where the real risk sits, and what a more resilient model looks like. Most chips designed into products over the last decade came from fabless companies: businesses


or three decades, engineering teams built their bills of materials around a simple assumption: that the location of


is not the chips themselves. The issue is that choosing a fabless chip means taking on that supplier’s foundry concentration as your own supply risk, and that risk does not appear anywhere on the datasheet. For engineering teams in automotive, medical


and industrial markets, where supply continuity is a regulatory and safety requirement, this matters more than most procurement processes currently reflect. It matters even more when you consider programme timescales. A chip, designed today, may reach volume production in 2027 and still be in active supply in 2038. The supply model chosen at design-in carries consequences across entire product generations, and entire geopolitical cycles.


What fab independence


really means True fab independence is not the same as owning a fab. New manufacturing capacity, however


36 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • JULY/AUGUST 2026


important, will take years to reach production volume. The more useful model, right now, is one where the engineering relationship with the customer sits at the design level, independent of which foundry does the manufacturing. A genuinely fab-independent design house


maintains qualified production relationships across multiple foundries in different geographies, not as a contingency plan, but as normal practice. When one foundry is disrupted, the design IP, test programmes and customer relationship are not affected. Moving production to an alternative foundry


requires real engineering work, new process characterisation, mask sets, wafer acceptance testing, but this work is manageable and structured, not a complete restart. A supplier locked to one foundry has no equivalent starting point. Maintaining genuine multi-foundry qualification


is not a natural outcome of the fabless model. It requires upfront investment in process-portable design methodology and active qualification work across multiple process environments, an effort that most companies do not take on unless supply


electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk


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