TSMC – Company Overview, History, Products

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is the largest Taiwanese multinational company known for semiconductor manufacturing. TSMC is currently one of the most valuable and largest semiconductor contract-based manufacturing companies. TSMC currently employs more than 65000 employees and it is currently headquartered in the Hsinchu Science Park In Hsinchu City, Taiwan.

The CEO of TSMC is C.C. Wei. TSMC is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of more than 420 billion dollars. In the financial year 2021, TSMC generated a revenue of more than 58 billion US dollars.

TSMC is most popularly known for manufacturing fabulous semiconductor designs for companies like AMD, Apple, Intel, ARM, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Broadcom. TSMC produces semiconductor products based on contracts received from these companies. Other companies that use TSMC foundry services include Altera, Xilinx, NXP, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, etc.

TSMC is also known for manufacturing graphic cards, computer hardware, GPUs, and other consumer electronics. The various production services by TSMC include Central processing units, microprocessor systems on chips (SoC), network interface controllers, integrated circuits, drivers, embedded processors, digital light processors, signal processors, motherboard chipsets, etc.

History of TSMC:

TSMC was founded by Morris Chang in 1987 in Taiwan as one of the world’s first semiconductor foundry manufacturing companies. Since TSMC gained an early start over other companies, it has been leading the market ever since then, in its field. Although, TSMC faced tough competition from Samsung electronics in chip manufacturing.

TSMC was listed on the Taiwan stock exchange in 1993 and 1997, it became the first Taiwanese company to be listed on the New York stock exchange. TSMC had been receiving contracts for A-series chips by Apple used in their iPhones and iPads since 2008. Apple began the trial production for their A5 and A6 series bionic chips for TSMC to be used in their iPhone 6 in 2011 to meet the huge demands. These contracts given by Apple led to a huge rise in market capital for TSMC.

Also in 2014, ARM announced a multi-year deal with TSMC for manufacturing their FinFET microprocessors. TSMC has also been receiving huge contracts from companies like Intel and AMD to manufacture their desktop processors to be used in laptops and computers. Nvidia also gave a contract to TSMC to manufacture its GeForce RTX series of graphic processing units. Also recently, Apple has been using its M1 chips in its MacBook lineup which are being manufactured by TSMC as well.

But in 2020, as the tension between Taiwan and China increased, TSMC decided to stop manufacturing semiconductors for Chinese companies like Huawei and HiSilicon. In 2021, TSMC and Sony made a new subsidiary company called Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing that will manufacture advanced semiconductors for supercomputers. In July 2022, TSMC showed record profits with its revenue rising over 75 percent year-over-year, despite huge inflation in the market.

TSMC – Products and Services:

The various products and services of TSMC are as follows:

Semiconductors – Currently, TSMC is the largest semiconductor manufacturing company for 5 and 7 nanometres of SoC. Tim received multiple contracts from chief manufacturing companies like Intel, MediaTek, Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple for designing and manufacturing their chips.

Graphic Cards – TSMC is also manufacturing graphic cards from the contracts received by companies like AMD, Apple, and Nvidia to be used in their gaming computers and machines.

Integrated Circuits – TSMC also produces integrated circuits like network interface controllers, digital signal processors, digital light processors, and embedded processors to be used within the computer for communication purposes.

Computer Hardware – The various computer hardware produced by TSMC include motherboard chipsets and hardware-compatible drivers to be used by the respective companies.

Wrapping Up:

TSMC is one of the largest chip manufacturing companies in the world. TSMC works based on contracts received by companies like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and Broadcom. Currently, Apple is one of the largest customers that provides contracts to TSMC for manufacturing SoC for their iPhones.