If the adage is right that there's 'No such thing as fab-lite, you either have a fab or you're fabless' then it looks as if STMicro took another step forward this week to going fabless.
The 30 per cent share it used to have in its only full production 300mm fab, the mainland China fab it shared with Hynix, has been reduced to 16.6 per cent following a further investment by Hynix which was not matched by ST.
Meanwhile, so it is rumoured, the only other potential 300mm fab in the ST stable, the mothballed Catania fab-shell, is to be facilitised with the help of €500m from the Italian government, then folded into an expected joint venture between Intel, Hynix and ST.
That would leave ST with only one source of 300mm wafers, its share of the line at the R&D centre at Crolles2.
It's a dramatically quick end to having controlled access to advanced microelectronic technology which was the strategy of the last management.
The talk of going fab-lite does not fool Europe's leading semiconductor analyst Malcolm Penn.
"There's no such thing as fab-lite", he says, "you either have a fab or you're fabless. Companies saying 'we're going fab-lite at 45nm', are really going fabless."
NXP has said it's going fabless at 90nm for advanced digital CMOS, Infineon at 65nm, ST will go at 45nm.
It's the end of a 25 year-old European strategy to match the rest of the world in semiconductor process technology.
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