Abstract
Taiwan semiconductor industry has earned a reputation for Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturing over the past decades. Today, Taiwan is experiencing a trend of moving from IC manufacturing to IC design. We choose the top 20 fabless design houses for our research and separate them into three subgroups by their product type, including Consumer IC, PC Chipset IC, and Optical Storage IC.The purpose of this study is to find out the permanent driving force in Taiwan’s IC design house industry. We will first examine three fabless subgroups to identify the permanent driving force among them. Knowing the three permanent driving force companies, we select three of these to find out which has the permanent driving force in the IC industry. Our research result expresses the MediaTeK, VIA, and NovaTeK as having the significant driving force in subgroups. MediaTeK is having strong evidence in the IC design industry. Three of these fabless have the same attributes. They have the proper product development strategy in this competitive environment. Therefore, products are very crucial to the fabless. We also provide some suggestions for the research period at the end of this paper.