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In the 1980s the term foundry has come to be associated with contracted semiconductor manufacturing.

The very first foundries were part of the MOSIS services. MOSIS was one of the first quasicommercial uses for the Internet run by USC- Information Sciences Institute. MOSIS services allowed single integrated circuit (IC) die to be designed by students and researchers at universities and corporations with internet connections. These "projects" were piggy-backed on manufacturing lots of commercial manufacturers like Intersil with a single wafer in the manufacturing boat being a MOSIS wafer and the rest being the company's commercial product.

In foundry economic model, a semiconductor firm need not make the enormous capital investment typically required. A company need only high IC designers and a marketing team to run a perfectly effective business. The foundry model has also helped foster the realization of the virtual corporation model in high tech.

In the 1990s the latest form of foundry services and semiconductor business model came into existence: the SOC or system on a chip. In this model, a foundry may only provide manufacturing while separate "boutiques" provide design services, intellectual property as designable components, and producers of SOCs either as ICs or as proprietary components to end-user electronics such as LAN routers or Thumb DriveA Thumb Drive is a small, compact, rewritable storage drives roughly the size of an adult thumb that interfaces with a computer via the USB port, usually carried in a pocket or on a lanyard. They are sometimes found in a smaller, more durable format to fis. The roles of each of these different businesses and process roles can be very fluid and changing.

The components used in SOC are of the order of complexity of full integrated circuits such as LAN controllers, USBNote: USB may also mean upper sideband in radio. Universal Serial Bus USB provides a serial bus standard for connecting devices, usually to a computer, but it also is in use on other devices such as set-top boxes, game consoles and PDAs. Overview A USB sy controller, ADCIn electronics, an analog to digital converter (abbreviated ADC A/D or A to D is a device that converts continuous signals to discrete digital numbers. Typically, an ADC converts a voltage to a digital number. The digital to analog converter or DAC perfors, DACIn electronics, a digital to analog converter (abbreviated to DAC or D-to-A is a device for converting a digital (usually binary) code to an analogue signal (usually a current (electricity) or voltage). This is done with switches or a network of resistorss, microcontrollers, programmable logic, RAM, Flash ROM, etc. Assembling these components product single integrated circuits which resemble full circuit board-based electronic systems on a single IC or chip (hence the name "SOC"). Some SOC foundries provide the ability to design prototypes using separate, off-the-shelf IC and transition these to SOC form using translation tools. This allows costs to be reduces as production is debugged and ramped up.