I am carrying out a brief survey on Outsourcing of Communications Chip Manufacturing. It seems that more than half of the chip makers I have interacted with are either fully or partly outsourcing their manufacturing requirements. I am testing some of the main reasons why they outsource and also the main reasons for not outsourcing (if they do not outsource). The survey will be a short one. Hope to publish this paper within the next few days.

Here is the backgrounder to the topic: The trend of outsourcing of manufacturing communication chips has grown into a $25 billion market with about 74% of the total communication chips being manufactured through outsourcing to Fabs and Foundries across globe, mainly to Asia-Pac. About 50% of the outsourcing market is held by large chip manufacturing facilities like TSMC, UMC, SMIC and Chartered Semiconductors located mainly in Taiwan, China, Singapore and Korea.