Page 20 - january_123021.indd
P. 20
TAP TIMES -20- JANUARY 2022
The BIG Boom! (from 19) croprocessors, which Intel handles in-
house). The largest customer, while not
disclosed by the company, is Apple, the
Taipei Times and others have reported.
Apple was 25.9% of sales
Sources say, in fact, that Apple accounted
for $11.9 billion or 25.9% of TSMC’s rev-
enue in 2021 sales. The U.S. was TSMC’s
largest market with 61.07 percent of its
sales, followed by China with 17.45 per-
cent of its total sales, followed by Taiwan.
With its remarkable growth over the past
34 years, it’s not surprising, driven by the
chip shortage, that TSMC now wants to
This is TSMC’s highly automated Fab 12. The indepen- expand its currently small offshore foot-
dent wafer fab numbers many of the leading fabless chip
makers as customers. (TSMC) print.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
(TSMC), headquartered in Hsinchu Science Although it’s been a quiet entry, TSMC
Park, Taiwan, is arguably one of the semi- planted its flag on U.S. soil in 1996 in
conductor industry’s great success stories. Camas, Washington with a joint venture
comprised of Altera, Analog Devices, Sili-
Largest pure-play silicon provider con Solutions and TSMC.
Founded in 1987 by now-billionairre and
retired president/CEO Dr. Morris Chang, Wafer Tech
the company has become the largest pure- TSMC acquired nearly 100 percent of this
play silicon provider in the world. GLOBAL- 200mm fab, Wafer Tech, in June 1996.
FOUNDRIES is a distant second. The campus sits on one million square feet
of land in Camas, about 30 minutes from
In 2020, it posted revenues of $47.78 bil- Portland, Oregon.
lion, and said its operations provided 24
percent of the semiconductors shipped In May 2020, TSMC announced that it will
in the world (excluding memory chips). next page
That, said TSMC, was up from 21 percent
in 2019.
First with 5nm
TSMC, according to its statistics, sup-
plied 11,617 products for 510 customers
in 2020, and was the first chip maker to
produce chips using a process for 5nm
devices.
The giant’s customers are a who’s who of
semiconductor makers and include Apple,
Broadcom, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Even TSMC’s Fab 16 in Nanjing, China is one of the company’s first
Intel is a customer (although not for mi- offshore facilities. It produces mainly chips for China’s domestic
auto market using a 28nm process (TSMC)
