Intel offers custom work https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.htm...

You forgot Samsung as one of the big fabs.

Thanks for pointing out both. I was not aware of Intel and, I didn't realize that Samsung got that big.

It occurred to me that Kingston probably has its own fab too.

Yeah, but my guess is Kingston's fabs are primarily geared towards Memory (i.e. NAND Flash and RAM) (much like Micron).

Memory is fairly easy to fab; in fact memory was one of the first things we saw Asian fabs rise up and overtake US/EU fabs on.

Also, Glofo stopped developing cutting edge nodes (7nm or smaller) after AMD had ditched them a couple of years ago. It's now all but a two-horse race between TSMC and Samsung.

Yes - Samsung is a gigantic fab.

That’s a recent development. For most of their history they never did. AFAIK

There are lots of fabs, but not all specialize in techniques used for imagers (like backside illumination). I worked in LCOS and we had one vendor qualified that could produce a shinier metal layer -- something most fabs wouldn't care about, but directly affected our brightness & power consumption.

Two is better than one but more than two is better than both options.

Of course. More fabs means more competition and better robustness across the industry.

In a perfect world, It'd be nice for Nikon to build a fab with the lithography equipment they already produce.