Silicon Foundry
/si-li-k[ən|än] fau̇n-drē/
n. A company that fabs chips to the designs of
others. As of the late 1980s, the combination of silicon foundries
and good computer-aided design software made it much easier for
hardware-designing startup companies to come into being. The
downside of using a silicon foundry is that the distance from the
actual chip-fabrication processes reduces designers' control of detail.
This is somewhat analogous to the use of HLLs versus coding in
assembler.
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