All people
PC era (1975-2000)
Morris Chang
born 1931
Founded TSMC in 1987, inventing the pure-play foundry model.
Contributions
- 01Texas Instruments executive who left to found TSMC in Taiwan at age 56.
- 02Bet that fabless design companies needed a foundry that would not compete with them on product.
- 03TSMC now manufactures the leading-edge silicon for every major AI accelerator.
Why it matters for foundry economics
Chang's pure-play foundry model created the modern semiconductor industry structure. The CoWoS-packaging bottleneck for AI accelerators is the direct downstream consequence of that structure.