To begin with, I’ll tell you what I mean when I say that TSMC controls almost everything. For example, ARM (Acorn RISC Machines) are the grey cardinals of information technology. Without them, there would be no smartphones, no GameBoys, no super-fast Cougar mice and keyboards. So, TSMC is very close to ARM in terms of influence.
Why? Because ARM develops and sells licences for the production of low-power chips. And Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces ALL chips: ARM, graphics, and x64 processors.
Why is TSMC so cool?
Just to give you an idea of how much TSMC produces EVERYTHING, all the companies that produce GPUs, i.e. video cards, are made by TSMC. So, NVIDIA, Radeon, and even Intel Arc – three competitors – are made by the same company. And add to that AMD Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc processors. Not Intel, they have their own factories for this.
And these are just the chips that have nothing to do with ARM. TSMC also makes chips for Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek. That is, wherever you create competition, whether in the mobile space or in the video card space, your chips will be made alongside those of your competitors. At the TSMC fab.
How did it all start?
As for the history of the company, I’ll start with the founder. Look at this man, his name is Morris Chen. Morris Chen was once 56 years old. And then Morris Chen, with the help of the Taiwanese government, plus help from the then mastodon of the market, Philips, plus a few investors, created TSMC.
From the very beginning, the company has been committed to the continuous development of semiconductor wafer technology. These wafers have always been more valuable than gold because each one can be used to make many, many processors. And they are not very durable, and even a speck of dust, even a drop of moisture, can destroy the value of a wafer.
One of Morris Chen’s most revolutionary ideas, however, was the approach to creating open access foundries. TSMC was essentially the first chip foundry that was more or less open to third-party customers. Prior to that, each of the chip manufacturers, whether it was Fairchild, Intel or AMD, had at least some of their own foundries, because each of the chip manufacturers had their own technologies, secrets, techniques, etc.
And TSMC has relied on constant innovation and globalisation. In the end, what difference does it make if you know how to make a wafer with chips, if you need a conventional machine that only TSMC has. And when you get this machine, TSMC will have a new one that is ten times better than the previous one.
The main problem
However, due to the openness of the process, the company has had and still has an almost critical need. It is the need to constantly develop, to constantly introduce new technologies and hone wafer production. There were not many revolutions in the company – the biggest one was openness to customers, but the evolution was non-stop.
An evolution in wafer quality testing, in the creation of masks for lithography, in 1991 TSMC licensed VLSI, very large scale integration circuits. This is when one large microchip is created from a bunch of small ones. That is, the way almost all processors are made now. And TSMC was not the first to do it, but you know, it did it cool.
And it is precisely because of the quality and stability of production that the company has reached the global level so quickly. The quality of wafer production is as important as nanometres. If, for example, the lithography technology is imperfect, the wafers will be of poor quality, and the chips will be poor, if any.
TSMC also occasionally produces defects. But it is the amount of this defect that is so minimal that everyone wants to work with the company. And this is one of the main reasons why America is so aggressively defending Taiwan. Because TSMC is located there, in Taiwan. And whoever controls Taiwan controls the production of microchips in the world.
TSMC summary
You can take this text as a lesson – no matter who you are, what business you are in, and what kind of technology you use… Never stop your own development. TSMC has become the undisputed leader in microchip manufacturing precisely because it has constantly developed wherever it could, and it has done so more actively than its competitors. And now its products are almost everywhere – from smartphones to keyboards. I wish you the same.
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