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FABrication) A manufacturing plant that makes semiconductor devices. Many chips are created by "fabless" companies that take their tested designs to a fab for production. Examples of fabs are Intel, Samsung, Renesas (Hitachi-Mitsubishi merger), Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Infineon, STMicroelectronics, NEC, Freescale, Microchip and Philips. The U.S. has about 10-12% of the fabs in the world.
Be the First on Your Block
You too can be a chip maker. All it takes is roughly USD $20 billion to build a state-of-the-art facility. See
process technology.