The foundry sector thrives on close integration with fabless clients and research partners to accelerate technological advancement and yield process innovations.

Yet, this necessary openness exposes stakeholders to the risk of design theft or leakages—sometimes through innocuous means such as shared testbeds, overlapping engineering teams, or insufficiently segregated data flows.

The tension between the need for deep collaboration and the imperative to protect crown-jewel IP leads to mistrust, legal bottlenecks, and reticence to pursue ambitious R&D alliances, limiting mutual growth and innovation.

Existing project management and data compartmentalization tools are not tailored for the nuanced, granular security requirements of collaborative chip development.

Cultural, technical, and legal constraints hinder the deployment of real-time monitoring or proactive leak detection mechanisms—especially when partners have different standards and threat models.