MICROELECTRONICS UK Fab independence Managing the risk your component spec doesn’t show you F


or three decades, engineering teams built their bills of materials around a simple assumption: that the location of semiconductor manufacturing was a logistical question, not a strategic one. That assumption has changed. The supply 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 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 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. It surfaces only when a disruption forces a re-quotation, a re- qualification cycle, or in the worst case a redesign — and by then the costs are compounding in engineering hours as much as in unit price.


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 in 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 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.


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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. That structural difference is what separates a genuine multi- sourcing capability from a single-sourced supplier’s contingency slide — one is built into the design process from day one, the other gets assembled after the fact, under pressure, once options have already narrowed. 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 — effort that most companies do not take on unless supply resilience is a core part of what they offer. That is the difference between a vendor who claims multi-foundry capability and one who has actually exercised it.


How ICsense applies this model ICsense is a Leuven-based custom ASIC design house with more than 120 engineers and a +20-year track record across automotive, medical, and industrial markets. The company operates without a captive fab, maintaining active production qualifications


JULY/AUGUST 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS


across multiple foundry partners in different geographies (including GF, TSMC, ONSEMI, Tower, XFAB to name a few). Its ISO 13485 certification for medical and ISO 26262 coverage for automotive functional safety reflect the regulated markets it serves — environments where a disruption to supply is not just a commercial problem but a compliance one. In those sectors, a supply interruption can trigger a re-audit, which is why the qualification work behind multi- foundry capability matters as much as the capability itself.


A recent investment in an in-house Electrical Wafer Sort facility makes the model more concrete. Most design houses route wafer test through external OSAT partners, which introduces a dependency and puts yield data at one step removed from the design team. ICsense’s dedicated ISO Class 7 cleanroom in Leuven runs this step in-house, keeping quality control and yield visibility within the same organisation that holds the design IP. The logic behind both investments is the same: to ensure that the engineering relationship with the customer is minimally dependent on external infrastructure or the like. Whether the disruption is at the foundry or in the test and packaging chain, the design team and programme continuity stay intact. The world has changed. Many of the frameworks used to evaluate component suppliers have not kept pace with it. ICsense is exhibiting at this year’s Microelectronics event, between 29 and 30 September in London, and can be found at stand number H22.


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