TSMC

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's second most valuable semiconductor company, the world's largest dedicated independent ("pure-play") semiconductor foundry, and its country's largest company, with headquarters and main operations located in the Hsinchu Science Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan. It is majority owned by foreign investors, and the central government of Taiwan is the largest shareholder.

TSMC was founded in Taiwan in 1987 by Morris Chang as the world's first dedicated semiconductor foundry. It has long been the leading company in its field. When Chang retired in 2018, after 31 years of TSMC leadership, Mark Liu became chairman and C. C. Wei became Chief Executive. It has been listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2330) since 1993; in 1997 it became the first Taiwanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TSM). Since 1994, TSMC has had a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4% in revenue and a CAGR of 16.1% in earnings.

Most of the leading fabless semiconductor companies such as AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek, Qualcomm and Nvidia, are customers of TSMC, as are emerging companies such as Allwinner Technology, HiSilicon, Spectra7, and UNISOC. Leading programmable logic device companies Xilinx and previously Altera also make or made use of TSMC's foundry services. Some integrated device manufacturers that have their own fabrication facilities, such as Intel, NXP, STMicroelectronics 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.

TSMC has a global capacity of about thirteen million 300 mm-equivalent wafers per year as of 2020 and makes chips for customers with process nodes from 2 microns to 3 nanometres. TSMC was the first foundry to market 7-nanometre and 5-nanometre (used by the 2020 Apple A14 and M1 SoCs, the MediaTek Dimensity 8100, and AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors) production capabilities, and the first to commercialize extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology in high volume.