What is the full name of TSMC?

TSMC’s full name is “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.” It is a semiconductor manufacturing company. It was founded in 1987 and is the world’s first professional integrated circuit manufacturing service (wafer foundry) company; The company operates in integrated circuit manufacturing and produces chips for customers covering many electronic product applications such as computer products, communication products, consumer, industrial and standard semiconductors.

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The full name of TSMC is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TSMC, referred to as TSMC), which is a semiconductor manufacturing company. Founded in 1987, it is the world's first professional integrated circuit manufacturing services (wafer foundry) company. Its headquarters and main factory are located in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan Province, China.

In 1987, Zhang Zhongmou founded TSMC, and almost no one was optimistic about it. But what Zhang Zhongmou discovered was a huge business opportunity. At that time, semiconductor companies around the world had the same business model. Intel, Samsung and other giants design their own chips, produce them in their own wafer factories, and complete chip testing and packaging themselves - all-round and unrivaled. Zhang Zhongmou pioneered the foundry model, "My company does not produce its own products, it only manufactures products for semiconductor design companies." This was unimaginable at the time, because there were no independent independent Semiconductor design company. As of March 20, 2017, TSMC’s market value surpassed Intel’s and became the world’s largest semiconductor company.

TSMC operates integrated circuit manufacturing, and the chips it produces for customers cover many electronic product application fields such as computer products, communication products, consumer, industrial and standard semiconductors.

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What is wafer manufacturing?

Any chip that comes from scratch must go through the main links of design, wafer manufacturing, packaging, and testing. The so-called wafer manufacturing is specifically defined as follows:

Wafer refers to the silicon wafer used in the production of silicon semiconductor integrated circuits. Because its shape is round, it is called a wafer; wafer manufacturing refers to Various circuit element structures are processed on silicon wafers to become IC (integrated circuit) products with specific electrical functions.

To put it bluntly, the wafer is the mother body of the chip, and wafer manufacturing is the process technology of actually etching the chip design drawings into circuits on the wafer. . If chip design is purely mental work, then wafer manufacturing is the manufacturing process of converting theoretical design plans into physical integrated circuits. It is precisely because of the specialized wafer foundries that a large number of start-up chip design companies can be liberated, allowing them to focus on their own design solutions for Tianma Starry Sky, while leaving the "actual manufacturing" that requires a large number of equipment, processes and workers. The "dirty work" is left to the foundries.

This chip manufacturing model, which is different from the IDM model, is called the Foundry model.

Although wafer foundry has long become the most critical link in the chip industry chain, at that time, TSMC’s idea of ​​trying to focus on the wafer foundry field was completely groundbreaking, so after its establishment In the past few years, TSMC's model was not recognized by major chip manufacturers (mainly due to considerations such as drawing confidentiality and process quality), so it has been barely surviving.

However, relying on Zhang Zhongmou’s connections that have been immersed in the industry for many years, and the subsequent arrival of the Internet era, TSMC has ushered in historic development opportunities:

• Firstly, Intel, the world's top chip manufacturer, decided to hand over wafer foundry orders to TSMC, which established TSMC's name in the industry.

• Second, with the rise of personal computers and mobile phones, the demand for consumer-grade chips has exploded. Many chip start-ups that have resigned from major chip manufacturers and started their own businesses cannot afford wafer manufacturing. Therefore, they have focused on the asset-light chip design process and handed over manufacturing to specialized foundries such as TSMC.

As a result, TSMC gradually took off and acquired its main competitor in the foundry industry around 2000. It was founded in Taiwan by Zhang Zhongmou’s colleague Zhang Rujing at Texas Instruments. "World Semiconductor". At this point, TSMC has begun to gradually move toward dominance in the wafer foundry field, leaving other competitors to follow and breathe.

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