Talk:Integrated device manufacturer

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"Integrated device manufacturer" - some thoughts.

I wish they would think such phrases through a bit more before releasing them into the industry to be kicked around and mis-used. There is room for ambiguity in most things including this one - not too smart to include the word 'integrated' in a phrase describing one of the main means to make 'integrated circuits'. Does the use of this word in IDM relate to the position/activity/set-up of the company? Or does it relate to the activity of manufacturing 'integrated devices' (which could be ICs, hybrids, MEMS etc.). I suppose that it is the former.

Anyone care to comment? 81.86.144.210 14:05, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

The provided example of an IDM (Motorola) teaches the very fickleness of such names: "Motorola owns and operates fabrication facilities (fab) where it manufactures many chip product lines, as a traditional IDM would. " -- Motorola spun off its fabs into Freescale Semiconductor in 2004, making Motorola a Fabless Semiconductor company now.

Mtm10 (talk) 11:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Mtm10 - the list contained errors originally, and even what was correct in 2000 is now seriously outdated. Although LSI logic owned and part-owned some fabs, SFIK it always bought in at least as much silicon as it made; certainly it was effectively fabless initially and then again long before Avago (now part of Broadcom) acquired it. Subsequent to Motorola's 2004 offloading, Philips spun off its IC business as NXP in 2007* (merged with Freescale in 2015), and IBM offloaded its fabs to Global Foundries in 2014. There are doubtless other errors and changes that I have not listed.
 * Surprising that this was not reflected when NXP was added to the list...PhysicistQuery (talk) 13:03, 6 November 2016 (UTC)