silicon foundry
Note: this item was deleted in
version 2.9.12
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.
