Foundry father

摘要

Even in the very anomalous category of tech entrepreneurs who??ve become pop stars, Morris Chang is an anomaly. He??s 79 years old, and unlike Steve Jobs, who makes stylish consumer gear, or Mark Zuckerberg, who runs the world??s largest social network and is the subject of a major motion picture, Morris Chang runs a semiconductor foundry. It??s a big one, to be sure: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), in Hsinchu, is by far the world??s largest foundry company, with annual revenues last year of about US $13.3 billion. And yet, the foundry business isn??t what most people would regard as the glamour sector of the semiconductor industry??a foundry is basically a fab-for-hire. Companies create their own designs and pay the foundry to manufacture the chips.