How Democratizing Fab Enables Rapid Innovation
The semiconductor industry has long operated on a fundamental paradox: the very infrastructure required to build the devices that power modern innovation is accessible only to those with hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars to spend. Traditional fabrication facilities demand massive capital investment, years of construction, and a scale of operation that is simply out of reach for the vast majority of innovators, researchers, and emerging economies. The result is a bottleneck at the very heart of the innovation pipeline, where brilliant ideas are stopped not by a lack of talent or vision, but by a lack of access to the tools needed to bring them to life.
InchFab’s premise is that this doesn’t have to be the case.
By rethinking the fab from the ground up, InchFab has developed an ultra-low-cost, modular, micro-sized fabrication platform that delivers professional-grade semiconductor manufacturing in a self-contained, deployable unit occupying approximately 100 square meters. At a fraction of the cost of a traditional fab, in the range of $5–10 million for a full line, InchFab makes it possible for startups, universities, research institutions, and emerging ecosystem players to access the same class of fabrication capabilities that were once reserved exclusively for the world’s largest chipmakers.
But democratizing access to fabrication is about more than just cost. It is about speed. Traditional foundry processes can take months or even years to navigate. From process development and design iteration to wafer delivery. InchFab dramatically compresses these timelines, enabling customers to move from concept to test-ready wafer in a matter of days or weeks. For a startup racing to validate a product, or a researcher working to prove a new hypothesis, this difference is not incremental, it is transformational.
The implications for innovation are profound. When fabrication becomes accessible, the population of people who can innovate in hardware expands dramatically. Researchers at universities in emerging markets can now build and test real devices. Startups can prototype and iterate without burning through their runway on outsourced foundry runs. Engineers can experiment with novel materials and process flows, silicon, GaN, SiC, diamond, glass, and beyond, on a platform designed for flexibility rather than locked into a single substrate or process chemistry.
This talk will explore how InchFab’s micro-sized fab platform is enabling a new generation of innovators to build faster, iterate more freely, and bring hardware ideas to market in ways that were simply not possible before. We will discuss real-world examples of how access to fabrication changes the dynamics of product development, examine the role of modular process architecture in enabling rapid process customization, and look at the broader opportunity to build regional semiconductor ecosystems.
The future of semiconductor innovation will not be built only in mega-fabs. It will be built everywhere.
BIOGRAPHY
Mitchell Hsing is the Co-Founder and CEO of InchFab, a company pioneering a new MEMS manufacturing paradigm that delivers low-cost, fast-cycle-time fab solutions for sensors and actuators. As an innovator at heart, Mitchell's aim is to lower the barriers of entry to microfabrication and enable more people to innovate on the microscale. Mitchell holds S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.