Computing · 1987

Pure-play foundry (TSMC)

A company that makes chips for others, and designs none itself.

Morris Chang founded TSMC in Taiwan to manufacture chips for other firms. The foundry model let fabless companies like Nvidia, Apple and AMD flourish; TSMC now makes most of the world's leading-edge chips.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Wafer stepper 1978
CMOS 1963

What it led to 1

Chiplets 2019

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data

ML hardware FLOP/s per dollar Source: Epoch AI, ML hardware (CC BY 4.0)