Foundry-fabless collaboration for semiconductor SoC industry in Korea

The trends in ecosystem and dynamics of semiconductor SoC industry in Korea are described in this paper. For the past years, the development of SoC (System on Chip) fabless industries has been phenomenal in that the total revenue of fabless companies became remarkably high and a number of major players of which the sales is about $200 million are emerging in Korea. It was mainly on the basis of multimedia SoC integration into systems like mobile phones and digital TV which have been pivotal IT growth engines in Korea. In order to sustain the continuous growth, however, SoCs need to explore the new engines to which they should be expanded, e.g., energy savings, automotives and wireless networks. The new foundry-fabless collaboration areas like high voltage analog and mixed signals/RF are presented. They strongly demand process and design collaboration, are less sensitive to market fluctuations and thereby have relatively long product lifetime and ensure continuous growth while less investment is required in comparison with logic technology.