Frank Theunis’ insight on navigating semiconductor manufacturing
Introduction
When you’re building a semiconductor start-up, you don’t have the luxury of endless time or unlimited resources. Every decision matters, and you feel the consequences of those decisions very quickly. One of the most important choices we made at Forefront RF was whether to invest in our own manufacturing capabilities or go fabless.
I’ve spent much of my career taking products from concept to production, and I knew early on that going fabless wasn’t just the practical option, it was the right one. It meant we could stay focused on developing our breakthrough tunable duplexer technology (branded as Foretune™), while relying on world-class partners to handle fabrication and assembly.
Why fabless was the right choice
Owning a fab sound impressive, but in reality, it’s a distraction for a young company. The costs run into billions, and the setup takes years, and you simply don’t have this time in fast-moving markets like smartwatches and wearables.
Instead, fabless gave us:
- Freedom to innovate – Every euro we spend goes into solving the RF front-end bottleneck, not concrete and cleanrooms.
- Access to proven expertise – Our foundry and OSAT partners bring decades of manufacturing know-how that we can tap into from day one.
- Scalability – When our customers are ready for volume, our supply chain can scale with them.
For me personally, this means I can focus on what I love most: bridging the gap between design and mass production, without the burden of running a factory.
The fabless journey in practice
Being fabless hasn’t made the journey easy, but it has made it possible.
I remember during our first prototype runs; the temptation was to reinvent everything from scratch. Instead, we made the decision to build early prototypes on proven PCB platforms. That saved us weeks, reduced risk, and allowed us to start functional testing sooner. It was a reminder that in a start-up, speed to learning is just as important as speed to market.
Another lesson came when we started mapping out the bill of materials (BOM) for production. On paper, it’s easy to design the “perfect” product. In practice, availability of materials like PCB and silicon can derail even the best design if you don’t plan ahead. We learned quickly to build fallback options into our BOM strategy, because in today’s world, supply chains need to be resilient as well as efficient.
Turning challenges into advantages
Start-ups like ours often face three main challenges: risk, cost, and time-to-market. For me, the fabless model has been the key to turning each of those challenges into an advantage:
- Risk – Instead of betting on a rigid, frequency-specific design that might become obsolete, we built a flexible, software-defined architecture that adapts as spectrum allocations evolve.
- Cost – By targeting wearables first, we kept our rollout lean, gathered customer feedback early, and avoided over-investing before the market proved itself.
- Time-to-Market – Our fab and OSAT partners will be able to scale with us, ensuring that when the technology is ready, manufacturing doesn’t become the bottleneck.
Fabless as freedom
Looking back, I don’t see fabless as a compromise. I see it as freedom.
- Freedom to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.
- Freedom to learn quickly and adapt designs without the weight of sunk investments.
- Freedom to bring a disruptive idea, a software-defined, tunable RF front-end, into production faster than would ever be possible otherwise.
That freedom has shaped not just our technology, but also our mindset as a company. It’s made us more agile, more resilient, and more determined to succeed.
Looking ahead
We’re still at the beginning of our journey, but we’re already seeing how the fabless model accelerates our path to market. Starting with smartwatches and wearables gives us the perfect proving ground, and from there we’ll scale into smartphones and beyond.
For OEMs facing the complexity of global RF design, my message is simple: fabless doesn’t mean fearless, it means freedom. And it’s that freedom that will enable the next wave of connected innovation.