This article lists the top 20 largest semiconductor companies by sales leaders over the past 20 years.

The article distinguishes between three types of semiconductor companies:

• Chip makers such as Intel and AMD that design, manufacture and sell their chips, which are designated as Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM)
• Fabless manufacturers such as nVidia and Xilinx that design and sell chips but outsource manufacturing to foundry companies.
• Foundry companies (such as TSMC and UMC) that manufacture chips designed and sold by their customers.

Only corporate semiconductor revenues are taken into account and businesses activities outside this sphere are excluded, for example IBM non-semiconductor business lines are excluded.

Gartner Dataquest Corp. has the longest history as the reference publisher of this ranking and offers independent syndicated research. Alternative sources of semiconductor sales market share have also become available. In the majority of cases, rankings are based on the analysis of the financial reports of the chip makers, although definitional issues regarding chip types, multichip modules, foundry manufacturing and chip license revenues create differences in reported numbers. The ranking for a given year is published in March of the following year when all the financial reports of the companies are closed. Many electronics press magazines report the information (like eetimes). This article has been written with the help of these publications.