is it easy to make a fabless company !!

[ahmed osama]

international rectifier fabless

Dear all

is it easy to make a fabless company !!
umm i mean a small one as a start , i mean some strong PC with robust software and expert engineers

is it easy or it is so diff. , i guess the most diff one , is the marketing
how to take a share in such huge world

i need to hear all of your ideas & tips about such topic

thanks all

 

[walker5678]

5 years plan fabless

First survive, then grow...

And there are many differenct ways to achieve the above goal, i think , and person is the key...

 

[FractalizeR]

korean fabless ic

Dear all

is it easy to make a fabless company !!

If that would be so easy... There would be so many fabless companies....

 

[omara007]

looking for fabless company

Well, you pin-pointed the highest challenge:
1. Marketing ..
Indeed, if you have market, this is almost 75% of success ..

2. The professional man-power ..
Professional here, means those who already went through the same process couple of times before .. and know how to produce a product .. professionally .. and on a standard level ..
Don't mix between good engineers, and professional engineers .. good engineers, are those who can do whatever they are asked to do .. and those, may not be of good knowledge of how to produce .. but they are smart enough to execute .. those are not the ones that startups need .. unless there are professional managers with huge experience leading them ..

3. Resources ..
There are mandatory resources that need to be available .. dedicated place, Tools, etc. .. this all needs money that can be taken from VCs or from the founders ..

4. Patience ..

 

[BuBEE]

singapore fabless company

This is a good topic.

I like to hear any idea from anyone too.

 

[AdvaRes]

mask cost for 0.5um

If you have a good Industrial experience and you have ready customers then you have 90 % of the chance for success

 

[Y.C Park]

how to run fabless company

Good topic !!!

My opinion
1. Current cash cow and future growing concept.
2. Market and customer.
3. Manpower.
4. Seed money.
U already know Fabless company need a lot of things
for example process fee & Tools & salary .......
and make a pcb / test equipment ....
5. Strong willing.
6. Different Idea ( I don't know what... anyway )

Just my thought ......,

 

[Colbhaidh]

korea fabless company

I suppose it is all relative:

It costs about 2-4 Billion to build a Fab and about 4 million a month to run it (including salaries, consumables etc). So you need to make a lot of profit to keep a Fab going.

So fabless must be easy right?

To be fabless, 1st you need a design tool set that is compatible with the Foundries (Cadence, Synopsis etc) The license and maintenance costs of these are substantial certainly above $400,000.

Then you need to make sure your design idea can run on a standard Foundry process and if it can, then it is probably not a brilliant cash cow since it will be digital or fairly low frequency mixed mode which someone with more money will beat you at eventually if it is such a good idea.

If you want to go into complex RFBiCMOS or RFCMOS where there is less competition, then standard Foundry models may not be good enough to guarantee 1st pass design success and you may need a design re-spin or two for each new product idea. This will cost you (more in a minute).

Since you cannot fully rely on the foundry models, then you need your own RF test set up to optimise your design to their process. Add on another $400K for this. You need the skills to run it and it takes a lot of time! So you need to employ an RF parameter extraction guru who can run Agilents IC-CAP software and hardware.

Now you need to get your design into a layout and onto GDS II. In mixed mode and RF, you are likely to encounter Design Rule Violations that the Foundry will ask you to fix. So you need to hire (or be) a layout guru.

OK now your ready to go. Well the smart choice would be to get onto the Foundry MPW run where you share mask space for prototypes with other customers on the same technology. It means only a few devices for you to test and know you design is ready for production. This typically costs $20,000+ at 90nm and 130nm.
If you design doesn't work you may need to wait 3 months for the next MPW run and there is no guarantee there will be one (if not enough customers want space it)

OK now your design works and ready for production. Well now you have to buy the reticle set (masks for the lithography process). A set of masks for one design will cost you about $55K for 0.25um through $300K for 0.13um and upto $1M for 65nm.
This is for each device you run. And if the design needs to be changed or tweeked, it will cost you some percentage of this to replace the masks.

Now you have to pay for the wafers that are run. Well, if you are a big guy and want 30% of the Foundry Fab capacity, they will kiss your feet with their rock bottom prices.
Otherwise they will screw you. So expect to pay $400 per wafer at 0.18um, $6-700 for 0.13um and do not even ask about 65nm!
Also, if you do not buy sufficient quantity over a sufficient time (say like at least 200 wafers per month) they will probably not want your business, which brings in another point.......
You are never guaranteed Foundry capacity unless you are big and trusted. So if ST Micro want extra 200 wafers per month from TSMC guess who they are going to boot out? And now what do you do? Sulk of course but then go elsewhere ?
Well if it is an easy digital part with rock solid design insensitivities you'll find somewhere. If it is a complex mixed signal RF monster, it just will not work anywhere else because you had to tweek your design and buy all that expensive agilent equipment and hire the RF guru.

Now the easiest way to vent your frustration at this point is the get the expensive RF guru you just hired and kick the living day lights out of him/her. It will not help the situation, but you will feel a wee bit better.

Now lets say you are now getting your supply of finished wafers from somewhere. You have to test them. This is done at a Test Foundry thingy. The Wafer Fab Foundry does not do this. So you have to hire STATS or the likes to test your wafers.
Now you need to write the test program, so you have to hire a test guru who is familiar with the test equipment the particular test contractor uses and they are not all the same.
You also have to get the wafers sliced up bonded and assembled. This will cost anywhere from $0.40 - $4.00 per chip. In most cases the Assembly Contractor will do test as well but RF testing is very difficult and you can lose 30% yield because the prober was not set up correctly on monday nightshift because the operator had an almighty row with her partner before leaving for work. And it rained too !

Now you have at least 200 wafers per month with probably 1000 to 12000 chips per wafer depending on their size (the bigger, the more expensive the packaging). More money and we have not sold anything yet !!

Well its 2 years later and the chips are selling well, the RF guru has recovered from his injuries, the Test guy is surfing the web behind your back and the layout guy is busy working because they are really sad that way. All of a sudden your yield drops at the assembly house. Now your losing 50% of every chip to some failure.

You can go back to the Foundry claiming they have a problem that is costing you money and some grief from your customers.
The Foundry will listen symapthetically and then say ........
It must be an assembly of a design fault because no other customer is having a problem on that technology.

At this point you will notice they are reading this off a rather worn laminated card they are trying to hide, because that is what the said to the other customer yesterday.
But you are a small fish and, the motto of every Foundry is :
"the Customer is always first ......... to get the lie about it being a problem unique to their design....."

Now you have to hire a Failure Analysis Expert (nand if you think layout guys are sad .....) and you have to buy him/her a reverse engineering laboratory with electron microscopes, wet chemical etch benches, plasma etchers..... realy cool toys by the way;

This will cost about $3-4M and you have ended up with a mini Fab that goes backwards !!! So much for being a Fabless company.

But life would be so dull if it were easy .................;

 

[ahmed osama]

fabless business plan

Dear Mr.Colbhaidh,

Thanks alot for your words which have painted the earth by a black burned silicion :!: :!:

 

[butterfish]

best fabless companies

Dear Mr.Colbhaidh,

you tell the true story.
but for a baby company, dont you think start with a RF product is a high risk choice?
if not enough seed money, find a low risk project for startup, mabye 0.5um process(mask+16wafer first run $15K) is more comfortable.

 

[omara007]

fabless company

Dear Mr.Colbhaidh,

you tell the true story.
but for a baby company, dont you think start with a RF product is a high risk choice?
if not enough seed money, find a low risk project for startup, mabye 0.5um process(mask+16wafer first run $15K) is more comfortable.

Hi butterfish
Where did you get this number ($15k) from ? .. I am preparing a business plan and I indeed was searching for similar numbers.

 

[walker5678]

rock solid manpower tagal

i am also wondering, $15K, so cheap...

 

[omara007]

how do fabless companies design

i am also wondering, $15K, so cheap...

Well .. he mentioned 0.5u .. I assume it's obsolete .. so, wherever you find some fab doing that, it might be enough to ask for this amount of money ..

 

[Colbhaidh]

fabless company process

0.5um is far from obsolete although I also think $15K is very cheap as this is cheaper than many MPW runs.

The best area for a startup to delve into would be power management. Whether you believe the world is going to choke to death next year or not, so long as Governments think they need to reduce energy waste in a heroic battle to save us all, then they are handing out a golden opportunity to anyone clever enough in power management design. Typically power management is still stuck in the 0.25um - 0.50um nodes. This makes design easier and 1st pass success more likely.
As an example, International Rectifier sell a chip for lighting control. It uses fast switching to set up a 50% duty cycle for lighting. The light runs (theoretically) at 50% power for much the same perceived brightness (since it is running 50% duty cycle in the kilohertz range). Of course it is not 50% power saving and the lamp will not be as bright due to thermal considerations in the filament. However it is only a matter of time before Governments legislate that all filament lighting must use this (or they may ban filament lights all together).
Anyway- what is this wonder chip from IR? - it is just the equivalent of an NE555 timer chip driving a half bridge FET output. The design for the NE555 is public domain, I think.
This chip is tiny, so 100,000's on a wafer. Sell them for 10p and make £10,000 per wafer.............easy money.
Well, if it were that easy, I would be typing this from my Yacht in the Mediterranean but the spelling would be worse due to too much champagne.

By the way, another opportunity is the imminent production of the very fast charge battery. These will probably replace almost all current recharge batteries as they can fully charge in 10 secs to 10 minutes. Problem is the charger. It needs to provide very high current. Most FABs have high voltage processes for battery charging applications (eg 0.18un - 0.25um with 20V, 40V options).
These are useless for high current. This requires a different process altogether.
It is not difficult to do, think of the power management circuit on any desktop PC.
It is just an array of buck convertors that take the 12V bus down to 1.2V and can provide current to the Micro anywhere from standby current to 80 Amps.
You can identify the circuit area as it has a bank of electrolytic capacitors all together to smooth the 1.2V supply. It is a fairly small area of the motherboard. could easily fit in a small charger. It uses quite a lot of discrete components so if you can integrate them on chip .................

 

[butterfish]

i am also wondering, $15K, so cheap...

Well .. he mentioned 0.5u .. I assume it's obsolete .. so, wherever you find some fab doing that, it might be enough to ask for this amount of money ..

yes, wherever you find the 0.5um process (china, taiwan,korea,singapore, malaysia) should be so cheap.
yes it's obsolete, but it is still stably enough for production.
but more and more FABs are planing to shut down 0.5um recently.

 

[walker5678]

If 0.5um is the minimum dimension of the process capability, 15k maybe reasonable. Because the machine is old.
However, many foundrary offer 0.5um process based on the 0.35um line, whose price is more expensive.

 

[techieno1]

Dear all

is it easy to make a fabless company !!
umm i mean a small one as a start , i mean some strong PC with robust software and expert engineers

is it easy or it is so diff. , i guess the most diff one , is the marketing
how to take a share in such huge world

i need to hear all of your ideas & tips about such topic

thanks all

Do you want to start a services based company or products based company?

If that is a services based company then you need few good engineers with positive attitude first. Positive attitude is very important for a startup. If you hire some engineers with fickle/hopping mind then that will be an extra headache for a startup to get success.

If it is a products based company then you have to be ready with 50% work completed for your new product/idea before start a company. Then important thing is getting the customers to buy your product. This is very important before investing more on the business. If you didn't get the customers at the end of the day then there is no use of your solution/investment. First give some customer demos and get some customers then expand the business to deliver your idea/product to the customer.

Regards...

 

[gauloisesbert]

Well .. he mentioned 0.5u .. I assume it's obsolete .. so, wherever you find some fab doing that, it might be enough to ask for this amount of money ..

0.5u processes aren't obsolete.
As a mixed-signal designer with a high bipolar respectively Bicmos part we use 0.6um processes for many projects.

Also for pad-limited chips it's cheaper to choose a process with larger structures.

 

[Yarrow]

Just wanted to add project management to the list.

Even if there are less the 10 people in your company, a good project manager will make huge impact. Why do yall think the (hardware) companies are guarding their project management methodologies as much as they guard their product ideas or whatever?

I good project manager will keep the team efficient, without wearing them out, thereby increasing the longterm survivebility of the company. Its better to have the test guru doing something more constructive the surfing the web for NSFW content... and a good project manager will make sure of that..

 

[buckaroo]

wonderful discussions!
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