Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, has transformed from a modest startup into a global technology powerhouse. Founded on February 21, 1987, by Morris Chang, a veteran of Texas Instruments, TSMC pioneered the “pure-play” foundry model. … Read More
The big semiconductor news this week is the legal action TSMC is taking against former Senior Vice President Wei-Jen Lo. This looks to be a serious game of 3D chess between CC Wei and Lip-Bu Tan so it is worth a look. I got this notice in my inbox early Tuesday morning:
Immediately following, there was an interesting discussion on SemiWiki… Read More
NVIDIA cuLitho Accelerates Semiconductor Manufacturing’s Most Compute-Intensive Workload by 40-60x, Opens Industry to New Generative AI Algorithms.
An incredible example of semiconductor industry partnerships was revealed during the Synopsys User Group (SNUG) last month. It started with a press release but there is much… Read More
My beautiful wife and I attended the annual Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Awards event last week. Usually this is a solo event but since my wife is CFO of SemiWiki I was able to get her an invite. I go every year and she wanted to see what all of the excitement was about. She also knows quite a few industry people from attending the… Read More
During my research I found an interview with Don Brooks from February 2000. It was very interesting and confirmed some of the things I knew about Don and brought up a few things I did not know. It’s an hour but it is a video of Don telling his story and is definitely worth a look. One of the things that was not mentioned however is the… Read More
Don Brooks is well known to many long time semiconductor insiders, like myself, but most SemiWiki readers have probably never heard of him. Don is a semiconductor legend and here is his story. This will be in two parts since he had a big impact on the semiconductor industry and TSMC. From 1991 to 1997 Don served as President of TSMC and… Read More
Most people ( including ChatGPT) think Morris Chang was the first TSMC CEO but it was in fact Jim Dykes, a very interesting character in the semiconductor industry.
According to his eulogy: Jim came from the humblest of beginnings, easily sharing that he grew up in a house without running water and never had a bed of his own. But because… Read More
High volume manufacturing is a 24/7 business with 12 hour shifts. You don’t always get to pick the shifts you want and you must cover for others when they can’t. It’s a challenging career and not for the faint of heart like myself.
In the 1980s and 1990s I spent time in Japan working with some of the top Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.… Read More
The TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium happened today so I wanted to start writing about it as there is a lot to cover. I will do summaries and other bloggers will do more in-depth coverage on the technology side in the coming weeks. Having worked in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem the majority of my 40 year semiconductor… Read More
Mad scientists have been a staple of Hollywood science fiction since Dr Victor Frankenstein created his eponymous monster in 1931. Pre-pandemic, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the main source of on-screen geeks-turned-superheroes, from Iron Man’s Tony Stark to Ant Man’s Hank Pym.
When it comes to real-life scientists on… Read More
