However, something that has baffled me for the last few years has been the inclusion of SanDisk the NAND Flash, come consumer electronics company in the FSA's fabless rankings.

According to WSTS and followed by the major market research firms, SanDisk is treated as a ‘captive' semiconductor company. It's share of NAND production from Toshiba's fabs is not registered as NAND units in market data reports compared to Samsung or Hynix for instance.

Toshiba is not a foundry supplier to SanDisk either, as they are manufacturing partners with SanDisk sharing the cost of equipment purchases for fab expansions, while Toshiba pays for the cost of the fab buildings. Though true fabless companies will forward pay to guarantee wafer allocation, few if any that I am aware of actually buy tools!

A chance meeting a few years ago at the IEDM conference that is actually on this week in San Francisco, I sat and talked with a SanDisk ‘manufacturing' engineer. I asked back then about whether the company perceives itself as a fabless company or something else?

Interestingly, he thought the company was clearly a new version of the historical Integrated Device Manufacturer (IDM) rather than a fabless company.

The new model IDM he referred to was that at the manufacturing level meant shared operations that included dedicated SanDisk employees being involved in production that worked side by side with a partner, in this case Toshiba. Both had common goals and the shared cost model was highly effective.

Market research firms have long claimed that no new IDM has emerged in over 10 years, concluding that this is due to the high entry costs of owning and operating production fabs.

Yet, it would seem to me that the IDM tag is being too tightly defined in the traditional sense and therefore excludes SanDisk from their slightly different business model.

On the other hand the FSA is applying a broader interpretation of the fabless term to allow the incorporation of SanDisk into its statistics.

So what kind of semiconductor company is SanDisk?

In my conversation with the SanDisk engineer at the IEDM conference, we seemed to agree very quickly on what SanDisk is, that being an IDM. A new model IDM but an IDM all the same.

The fact that the FSA ranks the company as the fourth largest fabless company in the world certainly helps the figures for the fabless model, while market research firms have remained reluctant to open their chip manufacturing books to include SanDisk as there is a strong ‘captive' element to SanDisk's operations.

In my view they are stuck in ‘No Mans Land' from a labelling perspective, but I would like to here from others, especially from SanDisk employees as to how they think of themselves.