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Morris Chang (張忠謀) once borrowed a line from Winston Churchill’s memoirs to describe TSMC’s two decades of dominance: “Before El Alamein we never had a victory; after El Alamein we never had a defeat.”
In his view, TSMC’s 0.13-micron process, which entered mass production in 2003, was the company’s equivalent of the World War II Battle of El Alamein.
In the more than ten process generations that followed, TSMC delivered on schedule in line with Moore’s Law, while Intel, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries all stumbled more than once. By “not making mistakes,” TSMC rose to become the world’s No. 1 chipmaker.
The company’s “invincible army” was led by a cadre of renowned commanders: R&D vice president Shang-Yi Chiang (蔣尚義), immersion lithography inventor Burn-Jeng Lin (林本堅), longtime “chief engineer” Y.P. Chin (秦永沛), and others including Jian-Kuang Wang (王建光) and Douglas Yu (余振華).
This story focuses on one of their most influential yet least visible figures—Wei-Jen Lo, who retired at the end of July as senior vice president of corporate strategy development.
For more than a decade, Lo, alongside co-COO Y.J. Mii (米玉傑), commanded TSMC’s tens of thousands of R&D personnel. Outside the company, however, he was virtually unknown.
https://cwnewsroom.substack.com/p/two-pivotal-battles-that-cemented-tsmc-lead