Get Stock Quote Here Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited (TSM) also known as Taiwan Semiconductor, is the world's largest dedicated independent (pure-play) semiconductor foundry, with its headquarters and main operations located in the Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Founded in Taiwan in 1987, TSMC was the world's first dedicated semiconductor foundry and has long been the leading company in its space. In addition to semiconductors, the company has also begun investing in lighting and solar energy-related industries. It is listed on both the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Morris Chang serves as Chairman, while F.C. Tseng serves as Vice Chairman. Mark Liu and C.C. Wei serve as Presidents and co-CEOs. Although TSMC offers a variety of wafer product-lines (including high-voltage, mixed-signal, analog and MEMS), it is best known for its logic chip product line with particular strength in advanced low-power processes such as 28 nm HPM with HKMG technology for mobile and high performance applications. Most of the leading fabless semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Advanced Micro Devices, MediaTek, Marvell and Broadcomare customers of TSMC, as well as emerging players such as Spreadtrum, AppliedMicro, Allwinner Technology and HiSilicon, and many smaller companies. Leading programmable logic device companies Xilinx and Altera also make use of TSMC's foundry services. SomeIntegrated Device Manufacturers that have their own fabrication facilities like Intel and Texas Instruments outsource some of their production to TSMC. At least one semiconductor company, LSI, re-sells TSMC wafers through its ASIC design services and design IP-portfolio. The company has been increasing and upgrading its manufacturing capacity for most of its existence, although influenced by the demand cycles of the semiconductor industry. In 2011, the company planned to increase research and development expenditures by almost 39% to NT$50 billion in an effort to fend off growing competition. The company also planned to expand capacity by 30% in 2011 to meet strong market demand. In May 2014, TSMC's board of directors approved capital appropriations of US$568 million to establish, convert, and upgrade advanced technology capacity after the company forecast higher than expected demand. In August 2014, TSMC's board of directors approved additional capital appropriations of US$3.05 billion. In 2011, it was reported that TSMC had begun trial production of the A5 and A6 chips for Apple's iPad and iPhone devices. According to reports, as of May 2014, Apple is sourcing its new A8 processor from TSMC and has likely become a significant customer. TSMC's market capitalization reached a value of NT$1.9 trillion (US$63.4 billion) in December 2010. It was ranked 70th in the FT Global 5002013 list of the world's most highly valued companies with a capitalization of US$86.7 billion, while reaching US$110 billion in May 2014.
If TSMC gets to 5nm before Intel gets to 7nm, Intel is going to have a very high hill to climb. This is where AMD was for over a decade, back when they had a fab. The Pentium 4 was a dog but it didn't matter, as they could dominate with process. If TSMC can crank out ARM based and AMD CISC parts at 5nm, Intel is in big trouble. AMD will no longer have to win with architecture. On the other hand, as feature sizes shrank below 32nm, transistor gangs replaced individual transistors for some purposes as such tiny transistors had too much leakage and insufficient gain. I don't know much about process down at contemporary nodes but I suspect the process shrink will not be as advantageous as it initially appears as more transistors will be needed to accomplish the same job. Also, redundancies will undoubtedly be increased since rising transistor counts statistically necessitate elevated failure rates and redundancies are used to keep yields at acceptable levels. Still, it doesn't look good for Intel right now.
Intel is one of the companies who ordered 5nm chips from TSM. They will be selling those before they can make their own 7nm.
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