A new home for your products

Outsourcing Solutions

Foundries typically provide process technologies and design environments for customers to develop their products in those technologies. However, there might be situations where customers already have existing products that need a new home for various reasons. These often result in very specific approaches to meet that need. 

X-FAB is your trusted partner for such “outsourcing” cases, which we distinguish from our “ordinary” foundry business. For over 20 years, we have been satisfying our customers’ need to outsource single products, whole product portfolios or even complete productions. To this end, we offer various engagement models on how to organize the outsourcing in practice.  

Products might need a new home because:

  • There is a need for a second source for strategic products.
  • Internal capacities are required for other products.
  • Internal fabs do not (or no longer) offer the cost structure required to compete in the market.
  • The respective internal fab is planned for closure.
  • Integrated device manufacturers (IDM) want to become fabless.

How does it work?

  • Existing customer products are transferred together with the corresponding process technology to one of our facilities.
  • We provide foundry services to the product owner or their customers.

Why X-FAB?

  • X-FAB offers internal second sourcing for most of its technology platforms.
  • X-FAB enables the outsourcing of entire product portfolios.
  • X-FAB is an experienced partner supporting a variety of “fab-light” or fabless strategies.
  • X-FAB has a track record of over 60 successful technology transfers, including more than 30 customer-specific process installations in the past 20 years.

 

Outsourcing Scenarios

Typical scenarios for outsourcing products to a foundry

Engagement Models

Potential engagement models for outsourcing

Product transfer
An existing product including the corresponding customer process technology is transferred to one of our facilities.

Transfer of tools or tool set
Single existing tools or complete tool sets can be transferred from a customer fab to one of our facilities, either as consigned tools or sold tools. This applies in particular if specific capabilities required to manufacture the transferred product are not available in our fab.  

Investment into captive capacity
Outsourcing customers can secure capacity at X-FAB through investment into their “own” tools.

Fab transfer
Under certain circumstances, we might consider the option of taking over the existing customer fab rather than transferring products and processes to one of our facilities.

Product porting
Existing products are redesigned using our open-platform process technologies and thus “ported” to a process available at X-FAB. This saves time compared to a complete product transfer requiring a custom technology transfer.
 

Capabilities

We provide a total manufacturing capacity of more than 1 million 200 mm-equivalent wafers per year. Details on each of our fabs can be found here. 
Our offer includes:

  • Regular cross-site transfers to enable double sourcing for X-FAB corporate and customer-specific process technologies
  • Process technology transfer management according to ISO 9000 and QS9000 standards
  • Staff of more than 450 highly qualified engineers for process development, improvement and quality assurance
  • More than 60 successful technology transfers, incl. more than 30 customer-specific process technology installations in the past 20 years
     

Proven track record for automotive certified production, including:

  • ISO TS 16949 certification for all sites
  • APQP/PPAP support, 8D reports and failure analysis support
  • Cpk-monitored PCM parameter testing (Cpk target ≥ 1.67) 
  • Most extensive PCM test coverage in the industry
  • Automated outgoing inspection (AVI) for volume production—all lots, all wafers, all dies
  • AVI electronic wafer map available for customer purpose
  • 20 years of record storage and traceability

Contact

For more information, please contact us:

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