The Great Wall of TSMC

By SemiWiki

February 4, 2014

TSMC doesn't just sell wafers, it sells trust. It's the Colgate Ring of Confidence for fabless customers. This focus on trust started at the very beginning when Morris Chang founded TSMC over 25 years ago, and still today trust remains an essential part of their business.

When TSMC started, the big thing it brought was that it was a pure play foundry. It had no product lines of its own. Foundry had existed before, but it was semiconductor companies selling excess capacity to each other. This meant that the buyer of wafers was always vulnerable to the seller company being successful and needing that capacity and they would get thrown out. And that was without even considering that companies might be buying wafers from a competitor, sending them masks of their crown-jewels and trusting that nobody would try and reverse engineer anything.

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