Foundry
The chipmaker that builds someone else's design, not its own
Imagine a printing press that prints books designed entirely by other publishers, never publishing anything under its own name, simply manufacturing to exact specification for whoever pays. A semiconductor foundry works on exactly this business model, applied to chips.
A foundry fabricates chips designed by other companies, called fabless companies, rather than designing and selling its own branded chips. This split between design and manufacturing has become the dominant structure of the modern chip industry, with companies like TSMC in Taiwan operating as the world's largest pure foundry, manufacturing designs for hundreds of fabless clients rather than its own chip brand.
India's semiconductor ambitions currently lean toward becoming an ATMP and OSAT hub first, with fabrication capacity, the foundry layer, still in its early construction phase through projects like Tata's Dholera fab, meaning India does not yet have an operating pure foundry business of its own at meaningful scale.