Fab Trends: Are Europe and Asia leading the way?

摘要

Not too long ago, most semiconductor fabricating plants made a family of standard chips or discretes. In a captive fab, these would be used in the company's products, or in merchant fabs, sold directly to a few major OEMs and to smaller customers mainly through distributors. As more and more functionality was put onto each board, the PC board houses installed workstations to check interconnect designs, which were often faulty. Some customers just let their board suppliers work out the PCB wiring for them. The next step for the electronics OEM was to let a contract manufacturer put the components onto the boards. Then it could focus on its real business — trying to keep ahead of a fast-paced electronics marketplace.