[ohazi]

It's interesting to note that none of the merged companies are fabless.

Analog and low-to-mid complexity digital designs don't usually use the smallest, newest, most expensive silicon processes that you need for processors, GPUs, and FPGAs. You generally need capacitors, precision resistors, and wider voltage ranges more than you do billions of transistors.

Maybe now that these older fabs are being forced to run as actual businesses rather than as bleeding-edge science projects, semiconductor design companies are able to bring them back into the fold to avoid dealing with the headaches of being fabless.

It's too bad though, because this adds a huge capital cost to what would otherwise be a really ripe opportunity for a new competitor. This consolidation has definitely brought higher prices and reduced the diversity of available parts.

The unit economics of analog ICs should be very good -- a product that needs 1/100th the silicon surface area and sells for 1/10th the price, using a much cheaper node than a modern digital IC. There should be plenty of room for a company to compete with Analog Devices on price while still making a killing.

[gumby]

None of these companies are pushing the process side and are able to run on old, well-depreciated fabs. Their business is uninteresting to the fabless giants. Why? After all they have old fabs too. But most of the embedded suppliers are forced to be low margin providers (often commodity or quasi-commodity parts only a couple of steps up the food chain from passives). They don’t have any margin to give away to the fabless guys.

Analog is a bit different in that “node” doesn’t really apply, but they are also not in the high value part of the value chain for the most part.

[panabee]

could you kindly elaborate on some of the headaches of being fabless?

[ohazi]

The design cycle time is longer. Every prototype requires a formal agreement with one of the fabs you work with, and usually involves a few million dollars changing hands. A few months is usually the minimum.

Even if it's expensive, owning a fab means you have the option to make prototypes of a design, or of parts of a design. You will never, ever do this if you're fabless.

We're good at simulating digital logic, but simulating analog designs is more difficult, and each process tends to have unique quirks. You want your designers to be familiar with these quirks, which is easier to do when everybody designing and using a process is under the same roof.

If you're making a chip that has exotic needs (voltage ranges, threshold voltages, RF performance, noise, thermal properties, bipolar + cmos, etc.) you will have more ability to tweak the process. Foundry type fabs typically offer a smaller "menu" of options that they're comfortable they can support. For example, I think you might have a hard time competing with some of AD's more expensive ADCs as a fabless semiconductor company.

Don't get me wrong... there are plenty of headaches to owning and operating a fab too.

[photojosh]

Did everyone with an interest here see the post here [0] a week ago about free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips?

There's certainly the possibility to do analog chips here, but it would take a big team effort.

(have only dabbled a bit with FPGAs with soft-cores, last project I used one for was ~2009: running Linux on an Altera NIOS core, where we sampled at 100 Msps from an input until we filled up the RAM, then more slowly dumped it over Ethernet to a PC)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755693

[panabee]

is a fab the only way to make prototypes or parts of a design? for instance, could 3D printers one day solve this part of the stack?

thanks for the detailed explanation!

[tails4e]

Being fabless has quite a few advantages too, the cost of building / running a fab is huge, so can only be afforded by major player, or folks who can live on very old process nodes. Most startups, and even ADI themselves use the later nodes like 16nm with external fabs like TSMC.