The dominant supplier of CDMA chipsets is Qualcomm, the largest fabless chip company in the world.

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It can license the ARM platform and compete with fabless players like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Broadcom.

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It became the world's third-biggest fabless chipmaker by revenue in the first quarter of this year, behind America's Broadcom and Qualcomm.

ECONOMIST: MediaTek and mobile-phone chips

One winner is Phison Electronics, a fabless flash storage device maker that has used its Taipei base to gain market share worldwide.

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Growth rates of "fabless" chip companies (that design in the U.S. and farm out manufacturing) have outdone giants such as Intel over the past ten years.

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Cisco Systems was a pioneer in fabless electronic gear, taking advantage of the internet to connect customer orders directly to the shipping docks of its contract manufacturers.

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The Fabless Semiconductor Association today released its second quarterly Fabless Fundings report, measuring venture capital activity among fabless semiconductor firms during the second quarter of this year.

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The company capitalized on the "fabless" trend that allowed a chip firm to concentrate on design and avoid billions of dollars of capital spending by outsourcing production to Asian factories.

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Like Nintendo, the new generation of small fabless firms capitalise on some special skill (designing cheap but powerful computers in Akia's case) and then use their compactness to run circles around the heavyweights.

ECONOMIST: Small firms in Japan

Aura is a fabless semiconductor manufacturer backed in part by Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ), which specializes in using magnetic technology as opposed to radio signals for near-field communications.

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