The insight
In May 2023, SFN reaches a conclusion that changes the shape of its commercial model: if a fast fab is cheap and simple enough to set up and run, then clients do not need to ship wafers to a centralised foundry and wait. They can have their own fab, on their own site, manufacturing locally.
The distributed factory network franchise model is born from this insight.
What changes
Before this point, SFN's plan — like that of most fabless semiconductor companies — assumed that volume manufacture would be outsourced to conventional fabs. The distributed factory network concept inverts this: SFN becomes the infrastructure provider, not the manufacturing bottleneck.
Clients who need reliable, rapid, sovereign fabrication — in defence, aerospace, industrial AI, or critical infrastructure — can deploy a distributed factory network facility and manufacture continuously, locally, without queuing or geopolitical supply chain risk.
The economic case
A conventional semiconductor fab costs billions of dollars to build and requires years to commission. A distributed factory network fast fab is designed to be accessible in capital cost, quick to commission, and straightforward to operate — making distributed, franchised fabrication a realistic proposition for organisations that would never consider building a traditional foundry.
The same-day manufacturing process and our semiconductor platform device physics are the enabling technologies that make this possible.