TSMC: Enabling Startups to Unleash New Semiconductor Innovation

By _TSMC Blog

April 19, 2022

Semiconductor innovation empowers products for nearly all other industries, such as smartphones, cars, medical devices, IoT applications, and high-performance computing. Companies from automakers to newly emerged cloud service providers and private spaceflight businesses have rushed to establish in-house semiconductor divisions to both gain a better grasp of the industry supply chain, and to accelerate innovation for their differentiated products and services. One effect of this phenomenon is a renaissance in semiconductor startups, where venture capital funding for semiconductor companies has more than doubled from 2021 to 2022[1].

Startups have driven semiconductor innovation from the very beginnings of the tech industry. Innovative products and business models often provide the foundations of a promising startup. Since its founding 35 years ago, TSMC has been working with startups across the industry, providing access to its technologies and manufacturing capacity to help them grow and thrive. We are honored to have prospered together with industry juggernauts, such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, Marvell, and MediaTek, since their early days. As the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry, TSMC has been tireless in researching and investing in process technology advancements, manufacturing capacity expansion, and design ecosystem development to enable those companies to unleash their innovation. Their partnership with TSMC allows each of them to invest in chip design and innovation rather than in capital-intensive semiconductor manufacturing and has given them the flexibility to innovate broadly and creatively. Those companies are now the wellspring of innovation that empowers our electronic world.

TSMC vigorously strives to support startup customers to confidently transform their forward-looking idea from inspiration into real products, manufactured at high volume. For example, the TSMC Open Innovation Summit (OIS) (formerly the TSMC Customer Collaboration Summit) brings together startups, investors, and other chip innovators to discuss transformational silicon designs for autonomous driving, HPC, AI, 5G, IoT, Metaverse, and Medical/Bio applications, as well as share valuable findings on how to accelerate the innovation cycle through effective collaboration, drawing synergy from each other and consolidating resources to achieve greater success. Their disruptive innovations are the dynamo that drives the semiconductor industry development in the United States and around the world.

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