The Chip Titan Whose Life's Work Is at the Center of a Tech Cold War – The New York Times
U.S.-China Relations
At 92, Morris Chang, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, can no longer stay in the shadows.
Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Supported by
Paul Mozur and
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan
In a wood-paneled office overlooking Taipei and the jungle-covered mountains that surround the Taiwanese capital, Morris Chang recently pulled out an old book stamped with technicolor patterns.
It was titled “Introduction to VLSI Systems,” a graduate-level textbook describing the intricacies of computer chip design. Mr. Chang, 92, held it up with reverence.
“I want to show you the date of this book, 1980,” he said. The timing was important, he added, as it was “the earliest piece” in a puzzle that came together for him — altering not only his career but also the course of the global electronics industry.
The insight that Mr. Chang gained from the textbook was deceptively simple: the idea that microchips, which act as the brains of computers, could be designed in one place but manufactured somewhere else. The notion went against the semiconductor industry’s standard practice at the time.
So at the age of 54, when many people begin thinking more about retirement, Mr. Chang instead put himself on a path to turn his insight into a reality. The engineer left his adopted country, the United States, and moved to Taiwan where he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. The company does not design chips, but it has become the world’s biggest manufacturer of cutting-edge microprocessors for customers including Apple and Nvidia.
Today, the company that partially exists because of a textbook is a $500 billion juggernaut that has put the most advanced chips in iPhones, cars, supercomputers and fighter jets. So critical are its airplane-hangar-size chip factories, called fabs, that the United States, Japan and Europe have courted TSMC to build them in their neck of the woods. Over the past decade, China has also invested hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate what TSMC has done.
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