Pure Play

The paper presents pure play wafer foundry in Taiwan to establish a dedicated foundry semiconductor industry. The dedicated foundry industry has become an integral and symbiotic part of the overall semiconductor industry. It now produces approximately 33% of the world´s logic ICs (by value of products manufactured), and it has greatly quickened the pace of innovation in logic ICs. There are now hundreds of IC companies competing with each other, rather than dozens as in the 1980s, and competition quickens innovation. None of the fabless com panies has to carry the heavy capital weight of a fab or the large R&D expense of process development. They can therefore concentrate on system architecture and design. Fur thermore, this increase in the num ber of successful IC companies hasallowed the creation of a significant amount of shareholder wealth. The impact of a dedicated foundry on the IC industry is still growing. While TSMC´s customers have become more competitive, it is TSMC´s mission to be the trusted provider of technology and capacity to the global logic IC industry. All this occurred in just over 20 years and germinated from an idea that very few people paid attention to. Fewer still thought that it would succeed.