Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense, it would force vertical de- integration. Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way. Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your mas…
> Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now. These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people running printing presses in their basement to crank out the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common with the printer for the NYT than it does…
The complexity of actual fabrication was always, and still is, entirely within the foundry. But in the early days of that model, designs could be more easily handed off at the logical level, leaving the physical design to back end companies, which makes designs much more portable between foundries. (The publisher analogy.) What's changed is that the complexity of physical design has exploded, and you can't make the handoff at nearly as high a level, and there is much more work that depends directly on the specific process you are targeting. Much more work at the physical level falls to the fabless semi companies. So it is much more work to retarget a design to a different foundry or process.