Only 117 of 640 Companies Officially Disclose Their Foundry and EDA

🆓 Free article · Anyone can read this article for free

The Bottom Line First

When we cross-checked all 640 companies identified by name in the global tape-out company census, only 117 companies (18.3%) had officially disclosed anything at all — a foundry or EDA.

The number of companies with an officially confirmed foundry was 109 (17.0%), and the number with a confirmed process node was 75 (11.7%). Only 13 companies (2.0%) had a confirmed EDA vendor, only 12 companies (1.9%) named a specific EDA tool, and only 33 companies (5.2%) had IP named together in the same official source.

The remaining 523 companies (81.7%) have no official disclosure at all. That silence is the core finding of this study. Not disclosing does not mean not using. All 640 companies design chips at some foundry, with someone's EDA tools. They simply do not say so through official channels.

The full list and the official confirmation details for each company are published together in the full census list of all 640 companies.

What Counted as "Official"

The standard was set strictly. We recognized only a company's own press releases and newsroom, product pages, annual reports, and securities filings. We also recognized cases where an official foundry page explicitly named a customer, and cases where official press releases and customer case studies from EDA and IP vendors named a company together with its foundry, process, and tools.

Conversely, industry articles and speculation, job postings, and industry conventional wisdom were all excluded. Foundry information recorded in the existing census list was also not copied into this study unless it was independently confirmed from an official source.

If it did not pass this standard, we left it blank even if it looked like a widely known fact. The foundries of Tesla and Google TPU, Meta MTIA, and Groq did not pass this standard and were left as "no official disclosure." That does not mean it is not true; it means it was not officially confirmed.

61% of the Confirmed Information Is About a Single Chip

Breaking down the disclosure scope of the 117 confirmed companies, 71 companies were per-design, covering a single specific design, 38 companies were company-wide, and 8 companies were partner listings.

In other words, 61% of the confirmed information is a disclosure about "that one chip." It does not mean the foundry and EDA a company normally uses overall. The same company can use a different foundry and tool for each chip. For Preferred Networks, Nordic Semiconductor, and QuickLogic, official materials alone confirm that the foundry differs by design.

Foundries Seen Among Officially Confirmed Companies Only

The ranking below was counted only among the 109 officially confirmed companies. It is not overall industry share. Because we counted each foundry separately when a company officially named multiple foundries, the total exceeds 109.

Below that, SK hynix system ic and keyfoundry, X-FAB, and Tower Semiconductor each had 2 companies, and DB HiTek and Nexchip, VIS, PSMC, SkyWater, and others each had 1 company.

Many long-tail foundries came from a single company's annual report: Himax. Himax explicitly names 9 foundries it actually uses in its annual report (TSMC, VIS, UMC, PSMC, SMIC, GlobalFoundries, Macronix, Nexchip, SK hynix system ic). A single disclosure illuminates an entire piece of the map.

Many of the 22 Samsung Foundry cases are joint press releases by Korean design partners. The practice of Samsung Foundry SAFE partners such as SEMIFIVE and GAONCHIPS, ADTechnology, and CoAsia announcing together with their customers created this number.

Process Nodes: The More Advanced, the More Disclosed

Breaking down the 75 companies with a confirmed process by the finest official node, 23 companies were at 5 nm class or below, 8 companies were at 6–7 nm class, 10 companies were at 10–16 nm class, 11 companies were at 22–28 nm class, 5 companies used more mature processes and specialty processes, and 18 companies used notations that do not convert to nm (SF4X, 22FDX, etc.).

The confirmed leading-edge cases are as follows. NVIDIA explicitly named TSMC 4NP in its own press release. Marvell officially confirmed TSMC 3 nm, MediaTek TSMC second-generation 3 nm, Socionext TSMC N3A, GUC TSMC N3P, and Alchip TSMC N3E. Phison and Silicon Motion are on TSMC 6 nm.

Conversely, the processes of small and mid-sized fabless companies using mature nodes are almost never revealed. This is because the more advanced the process, the greater the value of announcing it, and the more mature the process, the more quietly it is used. The process distribution is also not the actual distribution, but the disclosed distribution.

EDA Was the Rarest Disclosure

Only 13 companies had an officially confirmed EDA vendor. At 2.0% of 640 companies, it was the rarest category in this study.

When a company named multiple vendors, we counted each one. Socionext named Cadence and Synopsys, and EnSilica named Synopsys and Cadence together with Siemens EDA.

Cases where a specific tool is disclosed exist, in practice, only in the form of "full-flow success stories." Socionext listed Cadence Genus, Conformal, Innovus, Quantus, Tempus, Voltus, and PVS alongside Synopsys Fusion Compiler and 3DIC Compiler, and Ansys RedHawk-SC. MediaTek named Cadence Virtuoso Studio and Spectre X in a Cadence press release (2025-01-22). VSORA left Cadence Palladium and Xcelium, Genus, and Innovus, AMD left Synopsys Fusion Compiler, and Broadcom left Cadence Cerebrus, each as official case studies.

Only 12 companies had both a foundry and EDA confirmed at the same time. The TSMC and Cadence combination is confirmed at MediaTek and Broadcom, Renesas, and VSORA, and the TSMC and Synopsys combination at AMD and Socionext. The actual combinations of the remaining companies cannot be known because there is no disclosure. They are not absent; they are undisclosed.

Why is EDA so scarce? A foundry is part of a product's specifications, so a company has a reason to talk about it. EDA is an internal process, so there is no incentive to talk about it, and a vendor needs a customer's permission to use the customer's name in a press release. EDA disclosures are therefore extremely skewed toward large customers and leading-edge cases chosen by vendors. The figures of Synopsys 7 versus Cadence 6 are not market share; they are closer to figures for who was granted permission to use customer names in press releases.

📩 Following this story?

Get the follow-up analysis — earnings, reports and HBM supply — in your inbox daily at 10:30 KST. Subscribe free →

Representative Cases Identified by Name

NVIDIA — Its own press release explicitly names TSMC 4NP. The larger the customer, the more a process name becomes a marketing phrase.

MediaTek — A rare case where a TSMC 3 nm process and Cadence Virtuoso Studio and Spectre X are officially confirmed together at a single company.

Socionext — With TSMC N3A, a Cadence full flow, and Synopsys tools, it is one of the companies that disclosed most deeply in this study.

FuriosaAI — Articles had suggested Samsung manufacturing, but the company's official announcement explicitly states that RNGD is manufactured on TSMC 5 nm. On an official basis, only TSMC is recorded. It is a case that shows what to believe when rumors and official statements diverge.

Preferred Networks — Samsung SF2 and TSMC 12 nm are each officially confirmed by design. It is a case where disclosure reveals that a single company uses two foundries at the same time.

Nordic Semiconductor — It explicitly named GlobalFoundries 22FDX and TSMC 22ULL by product family in its own press releases. It is a case where dual sourcing splits at the product level.

Confirmation Rates by Country Reflect Disclosure Culture, Not Capability

This table is not a ranking of capability. It is a map of disclosure culture.

Europe's 39.4% is not because fabless companies disclose well. It is a figure raised because IDMs such as Infineon and STMicroelectronics and NXP write about the existence of their own fabs in their annual reports. Comparing fabless companies alone, the gaps between regions shrink considerably.

Korea's 25.0% is a result created by the Samsung Foundry SAFE partner ecosystem. Because of the structure in which design partners issue joint press releases on behalf of customers, the foundries of Korean companies are unusually well revealed.

Japan's 9.1% is the opposite case. A practice in which even large IDMs do not explicitly name foundries and EDA in official documents depressed the confirmation rate.

China's 5.8% is the lowest. In an export-control environment, explicitly naming a foundry and an EDA vendor officially is itself sensitive, and listed-company filings commonly anonymize wafer suppliers. Taiwan also has many companies that anonymize suppliers as "Company A, Company B" in annual reports, so there were not a few cases that could not be confirmed even for listed companies.

Dividing by tier gives a similar picture. For Tier A, in the production stage, 98 of 511 companies (19.2%) had at least one confirmation, and for Tier B, before production, 19 of 129 companies (14.7%) had at least one confirmation. This means confirmed cases are skewed toward companies with scale and promotional capacity.

Three Cautions When Reading These Numbers

First, not disclosing does not mean not using. The silence of 523 companies should be read not as "unknown" but as "not saying so through official channels." No ranking in this study should be interpreted by extending it to the distribution of all 640 companies, let alone the estimated 900–1,100 production companies.

Second, EDA press releases are vendor marketing. They select and announce only leading-edge nodes and large customers and full-flow adoption cases. Actual EDA use at mature nodes and by small and mid-sized fabless companies is almost never disclosed. The 13 confirmed companies are not a sample of the EDA market, but a list of names disclosed with permission.

Third, disclosures have a point in time. Some confirmed cases are old press releases. The Synopsys cases for Rockchip and Amlogic are materials from 2009–2010s, and Infineon's IC Compiler case is from 2009. Because they may differ from current flows, we left the source year alongside each row in the list. Partner listings (8 companies) are also weaker evidence than an actual tape-out disclosure, so we distinguished the scope in the list.

What the Next Study Will Fill In

The map this study left behind has two sheets. One is a map of the foundries and processes and EDA that 117 companies officially revealed. The other is a map drawn by the silence of 523 companies. The latter is larger, and it shows where the industry's actual information asymmetry lies.

The next steps are threefold. First, continue tracking disclosures in regions with low confirmation rates and among unlisted long-tail companies. Second, replace confirmed cases based on old press releases with the latest disclosures. Third, record, as a time series, cases where a company changes — foundry migrations and EDA replacements, and flow changes due to acquisitions.

The latest confirmation details by company are continuously updated in the full census list.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many of the 640 companies officially disclose a foundry or EDA?

117 companies (18.3%). Foundries were officially confirmed at 109 companies, process nodes at 75 companies, EDA vendors at 13 companies, specific EDA tools at 12 companies, and IP at 33 companies. The remaining 523 companies have no official disclosure.

Which foundry was confirmed most often among officially confirmed companies?

TSMC was the most common with 41 companies, followed by Samsung Foundry with 22 companies, own fabs (IDM) with 21 companies, GlobalFoundries with 17 companies, UMC with 5 companies, and SMIC with 4 companies. However, this ranking was counted only among the 109 officially confirmed companies and is not overall industry share.

Why were only 13 companies confirmed for EDA?

EDA is a company's internal process, so there is no incentive to disclose it, and a vendor needs a customer's permission to use the customer's name in a press release. EDA disclosures are therefore skewed toward full-flow success stories for large customers and leading-edge processes. The figures of Synopsys 7 companies and Cadence 6 companies are also closer to a distribution of disclosure permission than to market share.

Do the 523 companies that did not disclose not use foundries and EDA?

No. All 640 companies design at some foundry with some EDA tool. The 81.7% silence is not non-use but non-disclosure. In particular, China's confirmation rate was only 5.8% because explicitly naming a foundry and an EDA vendor officially is itself sensitive in an export-control environment.

Does Samsung or TSMC manufacture FuriosaAI's chips?

On the basis of the company's official announcement, it is TSMC. FuriosaAI officially stated that RNGD is manufactured on TSMC 5 nm. Unlike the Samsung reports circulated in articles, this study recorded TSMC based solely on the company's official announcement.

Does one company's disclosure tell us that company's standard flow?

No. 61% of confirmed disclosures are about a single specific design. The same company can use a different foundry and tool for each chip. Preferred Networks officially confirmed Samsung SF2 and TSMC 12 nm by design, and Nordic Semiconductor uses GlobalFoundries 22FDX and TSMC 22ULL split by product family.

📩 Missed today's analysis? Get tomorrow's in your inbox

Daily Silicon at 10:30 KST plus earnings and analyst-report breakdowns, first. Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, TSMC and HBM supply, read by practicing engineers. Join 300+ subscribers.

Subscribe free →

Free · No spam · Unsubscribe anytime