Semiconductor Startup Fab2 Moves Headquarters to Austin

Fab2, the semiconductor business formerly known as Atomic Semi, has moved its operations to Texas and now runs a 120,000-square-foot Austin facility that serves as its headquarters for research and production.

The company also operates a 30,000-square-foot "fab fab" in Lockhart and its original 25,000-square-foot garage fab in San Francisco.

A fab is short for fabrication plant. It's the factory where semiconductor chips are physically made. A chip starts as a design on a computer. Then a fab turns that design into a physical chip by processing silicon wafers through a long series of steps: layering materials, etching patterns, adding circuits, cleaning, testing, and packaging.

Traditional fabs are massive, expensive, highly specialized facilities. They can cost billions of dollars and require clean rooms, advanced machines, chemicals, water, power, precision robotics, and specialized labor.

Fab2 is betting there is room for a different model.

Instead of relying only on giant semiconductor campuses, the company is building smaller, software-defined fabs designed for faster chip prototyping and low-volume production.

The company says it builds the hardware and software needed to make chips, fabs, tools, and components. That includes chipmaking tools, pumps, valves, sensors, actuators, boards, chambers, gas lines, heaters, stages, and design software.

Fab2 is also building what it calls a "fab fab": a factory designed to mass-produce small semiconductor fabs and the tools inside them.

Fab2 is the kind of company that needs industrial space, technical labor, manufacturing talent, process engineers, hardware builders, and a region where physical technology can actually be built.

Austin fits that bill.

Austin's next business chapter is about companies building the chips, machines, fabs, robotics, and infrastructure that software depends on.