Definition
A foundry, or fab, is the factory that physically manufactures integrated circuits. In the pure-play foundry model, the foundry owns no chip designs of its own; instead it fabricates wafers on behalf of fabless companies that design chips but operate no fabrication plant. This separation is the backbone of the modern semiconductor industry and of Bitcoin mining hardware specifically.
The fabless-foundry split
ASIC vendors such as Bitmain, MicroBT, and Canaan design their hashing chips but rely on a foundry to build them. The leading-edge nodes used for competitive mining ASICs are produced by a small number of foundries, with TSMC being the dominant supplier and Samsung a secondary one. This concentration means access to foundry capacity is a strategic bottleneck: the company that secures wafer allocation at the newest node can ship more efficient miners first.
Inside a fab
A foundry runs hundreds of precisely controlled steps in cleanroom conditions, including deposition, photolithography, etching, ion implantation, and polishing, repeated layer by layer to build transistors and interconnect. The enormous capital cost of building a leading-edge fab, often tens of billions of dollars, is why so few companies operate at the frontier.
Once a design reaches the foundry after tape-out, the fab uses photolithography to print the circuit onto each silicon wafer.
See who designs the chips in the manufacturers directory.
In Simple Terms
A foundry, or fab, is the factory that physically manufactures integrated circuits. In the pure-play foundry model, the foundry owns no chip designs of its…