My 1999

Wanwan wants to develop high technology, especially the chip industry.

Basically no chance.

Because basically all chip companies at that time were in the IDM model.

Design and production at hand.

This includes Intel, IBM, and Zhang Zhongmou’s old employer Texas Instruments.

Even AMD has its own production line, but it was sold to a Saudi consortium in 2008 and renamed GlobalFoundries.

Faced with the strong first-mover advantage of the big guys, Benwan manufacturers represented by Zhang Zhongmou scratched their scalps and finally came up with a way to overtake in corners.

Leave the design to the customer, do not participate in the design competition with customers, and focus on chip foundry.

Focus more limited resources on one point.

And with chip foundries, chip design companies can design chips at a very low cost.

All you need to do is deliver the final chip design file to the manufacturer, which greatly lowers the threshold for the design industry.

In this way, chip design is no longer a game only for giants.

It will inevitably drive more players into this field.

Only with more players can we break the monopoly of the giants. As an OEM, Wanwan merchants can also get more orders.

It can be said.

This is the greatest business model innovation in the chip industry!

Based on the above ideas.

Familiar with the gameplay of the Western IC industry, the 53-year-old Zhang established TSMC, which focuses on chip foundry.

but.

The first semiconductor manufacturer in Wanwan was not TSMC, but UMC.

And it was there before Zhang Zhongmou came to Wanwan.

UMC also had a general who later became famous—Cao Xingcheng.

Lao Cao entered the Industrial Research Institute founded by Sun Yunxuan in 1974 and joined the RCA project.

Get the opportunity to study in the United States and become a big star in the semiconductor industry.

In 1982, Lianhua Electronics, the first semiconductor circuit company in Wanwan, was established.

At this time, UMC was engaged in both chip design and chip manufacturing, a standard IDM model enterprise.

Cao Xingcheng, who was still an engineer at ITRI at the time, took the initiative to fight for the opportunity and was appointed as deputy general manager of UMC from ITRI Electronics, and later took over the position of chairman.

When Cao Xingcheng was managing Lianhua, he discovered that doing both IC design and manufacturing was a disservice to both ends.

Under this situation, he suddenly came up with the strategy of focusing on chip foundry, and it is said that he even went to Zhang Zhongmou for advice.

According to him, Lao Zhang, who returned to Wanwan as the dean of the Industrial Technology Research Institute, plagiarized his own chip foundry idea.

Lao Zhang’s memories are another story.

He originally thought he came to Wanwan to serve as the dean of the Industrial Research Institute.

As a result, two weeks after taking office, Li Guoding came to discuss with him and said that the government wanted to establish a very large semiconductor circuit manufacturing company through a joint venture and asked him to chair it.

Lao Zhang said: The idea of ​​chip foundry was a solution he came up with during the communication with Li Guoding to solve the problem of Wanwan semiconductor.

The father-in-law of the two people is right, and the mother-in-law is right.

But the winner is the king and the loser is the enemy.

TSMC has become the number one in the chip foundry industry, which has also made Zhang Zhongmou famous as the "Father of Semiconductors".

It doesn't matter whether the heroes see the same thing or the brothers are at odds with each other.

In short, a new model has been born.

Famous management scientist Michael Porter concluded: TSMC’s chip foundry model.

“Create your own industry and create your customers’ industry.”

Lao Cao was very dismissive of the boasting of Zhang Zhongmou and TSMC.

He believes that UMC is the hero who created the current situation, and TSMC is just the hero created by the current situation.

Unfortunately, heroes are judged by their successes and failures.

Of course, TSMC’s development has not been smooth sailing.

Wafer foundry means building a factory, which involves a series of equipment purchases and a series of material purchases.

The land to build the factory costs money, and the manpower to run the factory also costs a lot of money.

In one word, it costs a lot of money.

Money is the threshold, money is the ticket, money is time.

But where does the money come from?

Anyway, Lao Zhang won’t pay.

He doesn't have that much money either.

There is no other way but Li Guoding, the big boss of the Wanwan chip industry, can come forward.

The man behind the scenes is running around for the establishment of TSMC. What he has to do is to persuade people from all walks of life to support the establishment of TSMC.

In a word, it is to raise money.

Li Guoding visited Wanwan entrepreneurs who owed him favors one by one, forcing them to invest in TSMC.

These people include Formosa Plastics boss Wang Yongqing, Tainan Gang boss Wu Xiuqi, Lianhua Shentong chairman Miao Fengqiang, etc.

At that time, Wanwan was rumored to have two of the richest plutocrats, North Formosa Plastics Corporation and South Tainan Corporation.

Wang Yongqing and Wu Xiuqi are the bosses of Formosa North and Tainan Gang respectively.

In this way, Li Guoding provided all the money to build the factory at TSMC, both soft and hard.

Yu Guohua, then a political boss, instructed Zhang Zhongmou to find a multinational semiconductor company as a shareholder in addition to government investment, so that he would have some foreign investment background and appear more international.

The most important thing is to reduce a lot of unnecessary trouble.

There is no shortage of fruit pickers in the yamen.

Lao Zhang, who has been together for half his life, also knows these things very well.

Relying on the contacts he had accumulated during his half-life in the United States, he approached Intel and his old employer Texas Instruments, but these two companies were not interested at all.

In the end, only the Dutch manufacturer Philips agreed to invest.

The core reason is that the chip foundry model impressed Philips. If it were an IDM, the investment might not be negotiated.

It is precisely because of this investment that TSMC gained a crucial ally.

ASML, a Dutch lithography machine manufacturer.

ASML was once a laboratory of Philips. Later, Philips and ASM established a joint venture to form ASML.

In 2004, TSMC and ASML, a small Dutch manufacturer at the time, jointly developed wet lithography technology.

TSMC not only achieved technological breakthroughs, but also helped ASML defeat industry giants such as Canon and Nikon and rise rapidly.

From then on, ASML and TSMC became brothers fighting side by side in the trench.

When Lao Zhang led TSMC step by step towards success, UMC, led by his old enemy Cao Xingcheng, also became the world's second largest wafer foundry.

In 1999, Cao Xingcheng suddenly announced the merger of his four semiconductor foundries and the "five-in-one" overall operation with UMC.

This move triggered a surge in UMC's stock price, and customers also came to hear the news.

After the merger, UMC's output value was second only to Intel and TSMC, becoming the world's third largest semiconductor company, and its market value ranked fourth in the global industry.

How does the saying go, the boss fights with the second, and the third dies in the end.

The two strong contenders brought disaster to World Semiconductor.

The founder of World Semiconductor is Zhang Rujing.

In April 2000, Zhang Rujing, who sold World Semiconductor, resolutely came to Shanghai with a team of 400 people and established China's most advanced chip factory-SMIC.

Here we need to talk about Samsung.

Samsung only entered the wafer foundry industry in 2005.

Unlike TSMC's market positioning, Samsung's foundry products are mainly for high-end chip products.

But the overall situation of the foundry industry has been determined, and it is difficult for Samsung to do anything.

At this time, TSMC has won two tough battles in technology.

Copper interconnect and immersion lithography.

Became the leader of the foundry industry.

1 disclosed copper interconnect technology.

Compared with aluminum, copper wire has a conductive resistance of about 40% lower, which dropped a bombshell in the technology industry.

In 2000, TSMC developed the most advanced 130-nanometer chip at the time and achieved mass production one year ahead of IBM in the battle of 130nm copper process. Liang Mengsong, the technical director, became famous with this battle.

TSMC won the first battle. If copper interconnect is still a competition of mass production capabilities, then immersion lithography is completely TSMC's leading innovation.

In 2002, the global chip industry entered a bottleneck period of development, and Moore's Law also stopped moving forward.

TSMC's Lin Benjian was invited to attend a seminar in the United States. The conference originally invited Lin Benjian to discuss the 157-nanometer process.

As a result, Lin Benjian directly put forward the argument that "using water as a 193-nanometer immersion medium can exceed the dry 157-nanometer."

Everyone suddenly realized it.

So it can be played like this?

In an instant, it was as if the Ren and Du meridians were opened.

High school students all know that water changes the refractive index of light.

Add a layer of water between the lens and the silicon wafer, and the original 193nm laser will be refracted, directly crossing the 157nm barrier and reducing to 132nm.

Questions follow?

Will water produce bubbles?

Will water contaminate the equipment?

Is it necessary to make it waterproof?

Water will expand when heated, and the refractive index will change. How to solve it?

The person who raised the problem becomes the problem solver.

With the strong support of TSMC senior executives Morris Chang and Chiang Shangyi, Lin Benjian's immersion lithography technology began to be put to the test.

The god of technology favored TSMC, and TSMC succeeded.

ASML, which advances and retreats with TSMC, also succeeded.

But Nikon, which was slow to transform, fell behind.

In 2006, Morris Chang was already 75 years old. He appointed Rick Tsai as CEO and only served as chairman. He began his retirement plan and Rick Tsai became the successor of TSMC.

Rick Tsai was undoubtedly a very suitable candidate. At that time, Rick Tsai had worked at TSMC for 20 years, starting as a factory manager. He was Morris Chang's right-hand man trained by him.

On September 14, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. At the same time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government, and the global financial crisis officially broke out.

At that time, people joked.

The United States saved the "Second House" but not the "Brother". It can be seen that the Second House is far higher than the Brother.

The damage and destruction of the economy by the financial crisis is global and the entire industry chain. The semiconductor industry has not been spared, and TSMC has not been spared.

In the first quarter of 2009, TSMC's performance shrank significantly and was on the verge of losses.

In a critical moment, CEO Rick Tsai adopted the conventional contraction tactics of saving money and laying off people.

Due to the excessive and drastic layoffs, some TSMC employees and their families strongly resisted. Some employees' families wrote letters of grievance to Morris Chang, and some blocked Morris Chang's residence to plead for mercy in person.

Facing the crisis.

Chang personally took the lead and served as TSMC CEO again at the age of 78.