Sub-system
A chip company either owns its manufacturing or buys it. That single choice determines its capital structure, its cost of a bad forecast, and how quickly it can adopt a new process — and the industry's shift from the first model to the second is what made most of today's chip companies possible.
In one sentence
An integrated device manufacturer designs and fabricates its own chips; a fabless company designs chips and contracts manufacturing to a foundry; a foundry manufactures to other companies' designs as a service.
The integrated model co-optimises design and process, which is a genuine technical advantage, and it means the company bears the full capital cost and the full risk of a demand forecast being wrong. The fabless model converts that fixed cost into a variable one and lets a design company compete on design alone.
The foundry's own economics are brutal in a specific way: a leading-edge fab costs tens of billions and depreciates quickly, so it must run near capacity from the start. That requires enough customers to fill it, which favours the largest foundry and makes the second and third positions structurally difficult.
Not only wafers. It supplies the process design kit, the characterised cell libraries, the verified interface blocks, the tool certifications and the packaging services. A design is built against one foundry's version of all of that, which is why moving a design between foundries is a re-implementation rather than a transfer.
Each node costs more to develop and requires more volume to amortise. Companies that could not fill a leading-edge fab stopped building them, either becoming fabless, focusing on mature nodes, or exiting. The survivors at the leading edge can be counted on one hand, and only one operates at large scale for external customers.
Most chips by unit are not made at the leading edge. Power management, analogue, microcontrollers, sensors and display drivers are built on long-established processes where equipment is depreciated and the competition is on cost and reliability. It is a different market with different economics and different suppliers.
2 of these are marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
Adding capacity means buying tools with long lead times, several of which have a single supplier.
EUV lithographyThe foundry's collateral is what makes its capacity usable; a fab with no mature design ecosystem cannot be filled.
EDA toolsFor high-end products the foundry relationship now extends through packaging, which is separately constrained.
Advanced packagingEven a leading-edge line prints most of its layers on 193 nanometre immersion tools, and a mature-node fab uses nothing else. Scanner availability, not just EUV, decides what a foundry can run.
DUV immersionA foundry ships tested wafers, not products. Without an assembly house behind it a fabless customer has nothing it can sell.
OSATOther pages in this map that name Foundry vs IDM as something they cannot do without.
What each company supplies at this step, and — where a public figure exists — its share of this specific market — with what that share measures, the period it covers and who published it. Some rows also show the company’s own reported revenue for the segment covering this step, which is a different thing: it says how much this business matters to that company, not how much of the market it holds. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
The largest foundry and the dominant supplier of leading-edge capacity.
70.2% global foundry revenueQ2 2025 · TrendForce
Integrated manufacturer also building an external foundry business.
Foundry focused on differentiated mature and specialty processes rather than the leading edge.
3.9% global foundry revenueQ2 2025 · TrendForce
Foundry operating mature and specialty nodes at large scale.
4.4% global foundry revenueQ2 2025 · TrendForce
The largest mainland Chinese foundry, operating mature and specialty nodes.
5.1% global foundry revenueQ2 2025 · TrendForce
Whether a credible second source at the leading edge emerges for external customers.
Whether integrated manufacturers succeed in attracting external foundry customers at scale.
Whether mature-node capacity additions outrun demand and compress pricing.
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.
Plutux is not an investment adviser. Market data and AI-generated analysis are for information and education only, not investment advice. Disclaimer