What role does Intel, NVIDIA, and TSMC play in the semiconductor industry?

As the global semiconductor shortage continues, semiconductor-related news is becoming a hot topic on a daily basis, but semiconductor-related companies are often referred to by confusing genre names such as 'foundry' and 'fabless'. It's hard to tell what role it plays. The role of these companies is explained by SemiWiki , a website that summarizes semiconductor-related information.

The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained --SemiWiki
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/307494-the-semiconductor-ecosystem-explained/

Semiconductors are widely used as parts of electrical appliances such as calculation processing chips for smartphones and PCs and temperature sensors for air conditioners. The production of such semiconductors includes many processes such as design, production, production of materials as materials, and production of assembly equipment, and these processes are distributed to different companies. SemiWiki groups those companies and explains the role of each group.

◆ Companies that sell IP cores
The IP core is written in English as 'intellectual property core', which literally translates to 'intellectual property core'. This IP core is like a small component that composes a calculation chip, etc., and there are many types such as 'IP core that performs calculation processing', 'IP core that performs encryption processing', and 'IP core that performs voice processing'. There are more than 150 companies that sell IP core licenses. Companies designing semiconductors can incorporate the functions of IP cores into semiconductors by concluding license agreements for these IP cores. For example, Apple has a license agreement with Arm and uses Arm's IP core for chips installed in iPhones and the like.

◆ Companies that develop EDA
Modern semiconductors are extremely complex, and one chip can contain semiconductors with multiple functions. 'Electronic Design Automation' enables such complicated circuit design, and is called EDA for short. According to SemiWiki, the EDA industry is dominated by three American companies: Cadence , Mentor , and Synopsys .

◆ Semiconductor materials
The production of semiconductors requires special materials such as silicon wafers and photoresists. Some of these materials have the top share of Japanese companies, especially Shin- Etsu Chemical and SUMCO have a large share of the semiconductor materials market.

◆ Semiconductor front-end manufacturing equipment
The semiconductor production process is divided into 'design fixing' for designing semiconductors, 'pre-process' for forming electronic circuits on silicon wafers, and 'post-process' for cutting semiconductors from silicon wafers. Since it is necessary to form a minute structure of several nm class in the previous process, a manufacturing device capable of extremely precise operation is required. Among the manufacturing equipment manufacturers, ASML , which provides extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) equipment to TSMC and Intel, is particularly well known.

◆ Fabless company
A fabless company is a company that designs semiconductors in-house and outsources manufacturing to other companies. Companies such as Apple, AMD, and NVIDIA are known for developing high-performance SoCs and GPUs, but they are not manufactured in-house, so they are classified as fabless companies.

◆ IDM
Unlike fabless companies, companies that do everything from design to manufacturing in-house are classified as IDM. IDM includes Intel, which designs and manufactures CPUs, and Micron, which designs and manufactures memory.

◆ Foundry
Foundries are companies that manufacture semiconductors at the request of fabless companies. TSMC, the world's largest foundry, has customers with well-known fabless companies such as Apple, AMD and NVIDIA.