TSMC

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

‘The advertising boasting the increasingly high performance of their electronic products speaks for itself’, says Colinge. Enslaved to the technical specifications of its clients, companies such as TSMC are doomed to multiply its technological prowess in record time. Soon, patterning transistors of five to seven nanometres will not be enough to stay in the game, with TSMC having already committed to lowering the count to three nanometres, or even one nanometre. In these conditions, ‘Never has the company’s energy consumption been this concerning’, says the former TSMC engineer.30 So it comes as no surprise that the total amount of fuel burned is hundreds of times higher than the final weight of the integrated circuit.

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In recent years, it has also had to contend with myriad accusations of pollution, because ‘the microprocessor industry releases liquid, solid, and gaseous waste’ into the environment, says a Taiwanese chemist.34 The exact figures are hard to come by, but producing one kilogram of silicon purportedly generates some 280 kilograms of chemicals.35 Not all the waste is treated, and since 2013 several of TSMC’s subcontractors, including the electronics groups ASE Korea and Nerca, have had to suspend their operations after spilling toxic substances into nearby rivers.36 Colinge further explains that ‘because integrated circuits need to be rinsed with deionised water [purer than distilled water] at every step of the manufacturing process, it takes a lot of water to develop chips’. This puts TSMC’s water consumption at some 156,000 tonnes per day. Although 86 per cent of it is recycled, Colinge recalls a recent episode involving his former employer.37 ‘Taiwan was hit with a drought in 2017, but TSMC needed so much water that it had to transport it by the truckload from a river close to the factories. ‘There were so many heavy-duty trucks that you couldn’t drive into the Hsinchu Science Park [an industrial park of 1,400 hectares in the north of Taiwan].’38 More staggering still is TSMC’s energy consumption: ‘The smaller the object you produce, the larger energy-guzzling machines you need’, adds Colinge.

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It’s painful to see all that science and expertise go into the bin.’32 The impact of this industrial logic on health and the environment are laid bare in Taiwan — the country that holds the record of producing more electronics per capita than anywhere else in the world.33 The island nation located 180 kilometres from the coast of China is home to TSMC, which alone represents over half of the global manufacture of semiconductors. In recent years, it has also had to contend with myriad accusations of pollution, because ‘the microprocessor industry releases liquid, solid, and gaseous waste’ into the environment, says a Taiwanese chemist.34 The exact figures are hard to come by, but producing one kilogram of silicon purportedly generates some 280 kilograms of chemicals.35 Not all the waste is treated, and since 2013 several of TSMC’s subcontractors, including the electronics groups ASE Korea and Nerca, have had to suspend their operations after spilling toxic substances into nearby rivers.36 Colinge further explains that ‘because integrated circuits need to be rinsed with deionised water [purer than distilled water] at every step of the manufacturing process, it takes a lot of water to develop chips’.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Industry, Global Competition, and Federal Policy (Congressional Research Service, October 26, 2020), 47–49, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46581.pdf. 179Hefty government subsidies by many countries: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Measuring Distortions in International Markets: The Semiconductor Value Chain,” OECD iLibrary, November 21, 2019. 179U.S. chip manufacturing declined: SIA Board of Directors, letter to President Joe Biden, February 11, 2021, https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SIA-Letter-to-Pres-Biden-re-CHIPS-Act-Funding.pdf. 179Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS): “Summary of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018,” treasury.gov, n.d., https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/206/Summary-of-FIRRMA.pdf. 179TSMC began construction: Stephen Nellis, “TSMC Says Has Begun Construction at Its Arizona Chip Factory Site,” Reuters, June 1, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-has-started-arizona-chip-factory-2021-06-01/; Alan Patterson, “TSMC to Build 5nm Fab in Arizona,” EE Times, May 15, 2020, https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-to-build-5nm-fab-in-arizona/. 179Samsung rolled out its plans: Anton Shilov, “Samsung Foundry: New $17 Billion Fab in the USA by Late 2023,” AnandTech, February 10, 2021, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16483/samsung-in-the-usa-a-17-billion-usd-fab-by-late-2023. 179Intel broke ground: Stephen Nellis, “Intel Breaks Ground on $20 bln Arizona Plants as U.S.

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One single firm overwhelmingly dominates the contract foundry market: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC is the third-largest semiconductor company globally behind Intel and Samsung and alone accounts for over half of the global pure-play foundry market. Combined with other smaller foundries, Taiwanese companies make up 65 percent of the foundry market. (The United States, by contrast, has 10 percent of the foundry market.) Raw sales figures understate Taiwan’s significance, however. Not all semiconductors are created equal, and TSMC is not only the largest contract foundry but also a technology leader. The overarching trend in semiconductors, since the 1960s, has been toward smaller transistors, which have allowed for increased density (more transistors per square inch) on chips.

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Ross, “5 Commandments: The Rules Engineers Live By Weren’t Always Set in Stone,” IEEE Spectrum, December 1, 2003, https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/5-commandments. 28fab costs have increased: Khan and Mann, AI Chips. 28leading-edge foundry can cost $10 billion to $20 billion: Arjun Kharpal, “Apple Supplier TSMC to Build a $12 Billion Chip Factory in the U.S.,” CNBC, May 15, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html; Mark Lapedus and Ann Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the Edge in U.S. Chip Manufacturing,” Semiconductor Engineering, October 26, 2020, https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-chip-manufacturing/; “Chipmaking Is Being Redesigned. Effects Will Be Far-Reaching,” The Economist, January 21, 2021, https://www.economist.com/business/2021/01/23/chipmaking-is-being-redesigned-effects-will-be-far-reaching; AleksandarK, “TSMC Completes Its Latest 3 nm Factory, Mass Production in 2022,” TechPowerUp, November 27, 2020, https://www.techpowerup.com/275255/tsmc-completes-its-latest-3-nm-factory-mass-production-in-2022; “Samsung Considers Austin for $17 Billion Chip Plant, Seeks Tax Breaks of at Least $806 Million,” Reuters, February 4, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/samsung-considers-austin-for-17-billion-chip-plant.html. 28$40–44 billion in capital expenditures: Yang Jie, “TSMC to Invest Up to $44 Billion in 2022 to Beef Up Chip Production,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tsmc-to-invest-up-to-44-billion-in-2022-to-beef-up-chip-production-11642076019. 28each evolution of chip production: Lapedus and Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the Edge in U.S.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

The facility, known as the TSMC, is the source of more than half the world’s outsourced semiconductor manufacturing. Silicon Valley may design the chips, but Taiwan produces them. If we’re being entirely accurate, the inscription on your iPhone should actually read, “Designed by Apple in California. Chips Manufactured in Taiwan. Assembled in China.” And it’s not just every iPhone that relies on TSMC chips. So do laptops, video games, and F-35 fighter jets. In light of its centrality to the most important electronic equipment in the world, the TSMC is now the world’s tenth most valuable company.66 The TSMC had managed to straddle both sides of the Sino-U.S. tech divide, with American companies accounting for about 60 percent of its business and Chinese firms making up another 20 percent.

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-China Economic and Security Review Commission,” Center for a New American Security, January 25, 2018, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Kliman_USCC%20Testimony_20180119.pdf. 65 “Index W,” Theodore Roosevelt Association, https://theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=339551&actr=4. 66 Eamon Barrett, “Intel’s decline makes rival chipmaker TSMC the world’s 10th most valuable company,” Fortune, July 28, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/07/28/intel-7nm-delay-tsmc-stock-shares-worlds-tenth-most-valuable-company/. 67 Sherisse Pham, “Taiwan chip maker TSMC’s $12 billion Arizona factory could give the US an edge in manufacturing,” CNN, May 15, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/15/tech/tsmc-arizona-chip-factory-intl-hnk/index.html. 68 Eamon Barrett, “Semiconductors are a weapon in the U.S.-China trade war. Can this chipmaker serve both sides?

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Can this chipmaker serve both sides?,” Fortune, August 10, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/us-china-trade-war-semiconductors-chips-tsmc-chipmakers/. 69 “Chipmaker TSMC eyeing expansion of planned Arizona plant -sources,” Reuters, May 4, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmaker-tsmc-eyeing-expansion-planned-arizona-plant-sources-2021-05-04/. 70 Steven Lee Myers and Javier C. Hernandez, “With a Wary Eye on China, Taiwan Moves to Revamp Its Military,” New York Times, August 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/world/asia/taiwan-china-military.html. 71 Ibid. 72 David Wertime, “Former intel officers: U.S. must update its thinking on Taiwan,” Politico, October 8, 2020, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-china-watcher/2020/10/08/former-intel-officers-were-thinking-about-taiwan-wrong-taipei-beijing-washington-conflict-490547. 73 Brad Lendon, “The US is standing firm with Taiwan, and it’s making that point very clear,” CNN, September 2, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/asia/china-taiwan-us-analysis-intl-hnk/index.html. 74 Paula Hancocks and Ben Westcott, “Taiwan risks being caught up in the power struggle between the United States and China,” CNN, August 15, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/14/asia/taiwan-tsai-trump-azer-china-intl-hnk/index.html. 75 “50 U.S. senators call for talks on trade agreement with Taiwan,” Reuters, October 1, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-china-idUSKBN26M7HL. 76 David R.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

But over the following years, in much the same way as the Prussian state helped the glass industry of Jena, the Taiwanese government steadily supported TSMC. What really set it apart from established rivals like Texas Instruments or Intel was its business model: while those companies designed and manufactured the chips themselves, TSMC would make chips for other people – it would be a ‘foundry’. If you are looking for a company that embodies the Material World, you could hardly do better than TSMC. Here is a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla, or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm (‘fab’ being short for fabrication plant).

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While in theory the export ban will likely hamper China’s efforts to catch up with the Taiwanese and South Korean industries, according to some senior figures in the business, the gap had already been widening rather than narrowing for some time. A decade ago SMIC’s technology was four years behind TSMC’s. Today SMIC is thought to be 10 or 12 years behind TSMC, despite a flood of government money being unleashed on the sector. In much the same way as they vied with each other to build the biggest bridge or the most high-speed railway lines a few years ago, today Chinese provinces are all building new fabs. The problem, however, is that they are struggling to find the expertise to run them.

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Yet it is hard, mind-boggling, even, to imagine compressing the journey we have just experienced into a single country, without relying on companies or imports from other parts of the world. Even if China invaded Taiwan and even if TSMC’s fabs survived the assault (some have suggested that the company incorporates explosives into the foundations, to be detonated upon invasion much as armies destroy bridges before retreating), that would not resolve its issue. Fab 18 might be where the world’s most advanced chips are made, but they are mostly designed elsewhere, primarily in the US, with intellectual property that derives from a company based in Cambridge, England: ARM. TSMC’s fabs would not function without machine tools from the Netherlands and Japan, or chemicals from Germany and bits and pieces from a range of other nations.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

My friend, Hank Zona, used to nod his head in someone’s direction and whisper, “That guy has more chins than a Chinese phone book.” I never knew what that meant, but now I do—14 pages’ worth. The address was simply Science-based Industrial Park. The taxi driver never heard of TSMC. This was 1991. By 2001, he probably worked for TSMC. I was met in the lobby by Dr. Morris Chang. “OK, let’s go then. You’ll need a bunny suit.” I had been on enough tours to know the routine. I put the white booties over my shoes and slid on pants, a jacket and a sur- 132 Running Money gical cap to tuck all my hair into.

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I could have gone back to other venture capitalists and raised the $100 million I needed to build a fab, but they would have owned the company, not me and my team. So we looked around to see if anyone had a fab they weren’t using completely and maybe wanted to rent us some space.” “Did you find one around here?” “No, we found TSMC instead.” “Who?” “The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. All they do is run a fab and sell finished wafers to us at a fixed price. We can put anything we want on those wafers, same price. So we crank out more designs, and these guys will manufacture them all.” “This is a big change.” “It’s really no different than the publishing business.

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Investors “get” profits—it is their common language. My problem was in believing that someone would just make chips for Xilinx or any of the other fab-less chip companies that quickly followed. My annual December trip to the Far East was coming up, so I scheduled a side trip to Taipei. It was a bit more than a day trip to Kansas City. TSMC was located in Hsinchu City, a bumpy hour-plus cab ride from Taipei. I had never been to Taiwan before, but I had a whopping 18 hours to figure out how this fab-less stuff worked—no time to see the sights. Hsinchu City looked a lot like Parsippany, New Jersey: a bunch of industrial parks, a couple of malls and one medium-size hotel.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

But in 2017, you would be asked about Intel’s strategy for dealing with the slowing of Moore’s Law. And in 2019, you would be asked about Intel’s strategy for dealing with the rise of special-purpose processors, as developed by Google and Microsoft. And in 2021, you would be asked about the company’s seeming loss of process leadership to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The idea that Intel has a single unchanging “strategy” that spans these challenges reduces the concept to a slogan or motto, like “Be the best.” Strategy is problem solving, and it is best expressed relative to a particular challenge. Strategy should be an ongoing process. This concept of strategy allows a company to have a strategy process that is not a constant restatement of some vague overall purpose and intent.

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Recently, AMD’s share of the market increased because its new Ryzen chips outperformed Intel’s current offerings.6 • Manufacturing. Intel was having major problems moving from its 14nm node to the 10nm node. Intel’s delays not only were embarrassing to the company, but put other tech companies plans at risk.7 Contract chip foundry TSMC did not seem to have experienced these problems at this node, allowing Intel’s chief chip rival, AMD, to jump ahead in its processor performance. • Missing Mobile. Intel’s strategy in mobile had been to develop the Atom, a small x86 processor optimized for mobile devices. The offering did not win many mobile phone placements.

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Study-Group Analysis The study group agreed that the set of issues facing Intel were gnarly. They differed in their opinions about importance. Ashok, one of the participants, said, “They have to solve the manufacturing issues. If they don’t, they will lose the cloud and all their revenue. If Intel cannot make the next 7nm node, it might as well just become another customer for TSMC.” Differing sharply, Abigail felt that culture was issue number one. She offered that “the whole race to smaller and smaller is coming to an end. The cloud is turning into a cost game, and Intel is not ready for that. It has coasted on the Wintel standard for years and is not prepared for cost competition.”

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

It’s remarkable how this legacy is only slowly disappearing. In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA. Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory. TSMC’s machinery to make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company. ASML’s machines, which use a technique known as extreme ultraviolet lithography and produce chips at levels of astonishing atomic precision, are among the most complex manufactured goods in history.

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See authoritarianism; surveillance traffic optimization, 98 transcriptors, 88 transformers, 64, 90–91 transistor, 32–33, 67 Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968), 43, 263 Tsar Bomba, 42 Tsinghua University, 121 TSMC, 251 Turing, Alan, 35, 75 23andMe, 81 2001: A Space Odyssey, 110 U Uighur ethnic cleansing, 195 Ukraine, 44, 103–4, 161–62 Unabomber, 213 United States export controls, 249–50 international cooperation and, 265–66 surveillance, 195 universal basic income (UBI), 262 University of Oxford, 101 Urban II (pope), 39 urbanization, technology waves and, 27–28 U.S.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Published 1 Mar 2006

High-technology Exports of East Asia Six: China, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand Taiwan, whose numbers figure 34 above does not include because the cowardly international agencies do not recognize it, has become a remarkable technological success story. The Taiwan Semiconductor Machinery Corporation (TSMC) is the world’s largest producer of foundry chips. The Electronics Research and Service Organization (itself started by the Taiwanese government in the early 1970s to get a jump on the IT industry) started the TSMC as a joint venture with Phillips of Holland in 1987.12 Today TSMC has sales of $2.3 billion.13 Taiwan also produces such complex items as notebook and desktop PCs, video cards, and sound cards. Acer Computers of Taiwan is the world’s third-largest manufacturer of PCs, with sales of eight billion dollars.14 Taiwan’s amazing economy has produced ten billionaires.15 The Dark Continent Born Again But what hope could there be for a region impoverished by warlords, civil conflict, unending war, corruption, and brutal tyrants, after futile attempts by the West to influence events?

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Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819–1975, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 89. 11.http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf05300/pdf/tables.pdf. 12.Alice Amsden, The Rise of the “Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 221. 13.http://www.tsmc.com/english/a_about/a_about_index.htm. 14.Amsden, Rise of the “Rest,” p. 193, 199; http://www.brandingasia.com/cases/ case1.htm. 15.http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=10&passYear=2004&pass ListType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties= %2Bnumberfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank& category1=Country+of+Residence&searchParameter1=7Str%7C%7CPatCS% 7C%7CTaiwan&category2=category&searchParameter2=unset. 16.Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, New York: Penguin Books, 1969. 17.Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931–1949, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 37. 18.John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 1998, p. 284. 19.Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2d ed., New York: Norton, 1999. 20.Jespersen, American Images, p. 120; Fairbank and Goldman, China, p. 291. 21.Rist, The History of Development, p. 65. 22.For year ending in September 2004, http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/ statistics/product/naics/naicsctry/imports/i316214.html. 23.Amsden, Rise of the “Rest,” p. 217. 24.http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/eap/eap.nsf/Countries/China/42F2084B942D74 C68p. 5256C7600687DBF?

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

Somewhere, in nearly every corner of this sprawling city, someone is building a part that will end up in an iPhone, or maybe snapping the whole thing together. Of the two hundred addresses that Apple lists for its top suppliers on its annual report, nearly half are located in just two cities: here and Shenzhen. The forty suppliers here in Shanghai, like TSMC, the chip manufacturer that produces the iPhone’s ARM-based brain, are scattered far and wide across the city. When I arrive at TSMC’s headquarters, the security checkpoint is posted far from the complex, so I can’t see much of anything besides the well-groomed lawn and the mammoth gray-and-red plant walls. The guards, of course, won’t let me in for a closer look.

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My fixer and translator, Wang Yang—we’ve chosen to use a pseudonym to protect her identity—was a tremendous help in getting factory workers to talk. She’s a big reason we spoke to a couple dozen sources over the course of a handful of visits. We visited Foxconn’s Longhua and Guanlan and Pegatron’s Shanghai factory, as well as supplier factories such as TSMC, the chip fabricator. Of the Foxconn employees, Xu, Zhao, and their friend were the most candid, but many factory workers were willing to speak to us outside the gates, at lunchtime noodle shops, and at the local market. From these interviews, combined with research from the above sources, I feel confident I was able to capture a solid snapshot of the state of play at China’s electronics factories.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

From the United States, participants in the PortalPlayer network included Texas Instruments and Linear Technologies, a small company specializing in power-management integrated circuits. From Japan, PortalPlayer recruited Sharp to provide flash memory, Sony for battery technology, and Toshiba for hard-disk-drive technology. In Taiwan, PortalPlayer developed close relationships with both United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to access silicon-foundry capabilities. In effect, PortalPlayer had deployed a pull platform to drive rapid iterations of innovative MP3 designs by accessing and connecting with world-class capabilities from specialized companies around the globe. When Apple came up with an idea for a new MP3 product line coupled with an online music store, it approached PortalPlayer to mobilize its global design network; as a result, Apple was able to enter the market with its iPod just nine months after the initial product approval.

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See Geographic spikes Standards adopted through shaping strategies adoption of McLean’s containerized shipping driven through shaping strategies Novell’s network operating system as de facto of protocols designed to facilitate interactions Visa Start-up companies Stocks (equities) Stocks of knowledge compared to flows of new knowledge as diminishing in value as means, ends, toward knowledge flows Storage law for data Stress in push systems Stress in the workplace Strong ties Success Super-nodes Surfaces, exposing Surfermag.com Surfingthemag.com Surfline.com Sur vival access as essential toig and serendipity Tacit knowledge about how to do new things conveyed through conferences cultivated through listening, empathy described versus explicit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Talent development institutions reoriented around needed by institutions as new trajectory of institutions and open-innovation efforts supported by focused initiatives TCP/IP standard Teahupoo, Tahiti Teams and guilds as collaborative creation efforts interacting, as creation space success elements as peer-to-peer networks performance-driven of surfers World of Warcraft (WoW) social networks Teasers for online social network attention Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Perez) Technology CPU innovation breaks down push distinguished from platforms as tool for reaching talent outside institutions Tertius Gaudens Tertius Iungens Tesla Motors Texas Instruments Thinking for a Living (Davenport) Thomas, Doug T-Mobile Too big to fail concept Toshiba Tow-in surfing Toyota Toys and games industries Training programs Trajectory defined as meaningful destination as element of journey toward pull igigig for finding, motivating, individual passion, creativity as shaping view of talent development for institutions Travel services as search engines Travelocity The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Merton and Barber) “The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Sarendip” fable Twitter in corporate contexts Iranian protests videos secured script used by protestors in Iran TWsurf.com Uncertainty.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Supply chains of companies like Apple, Samsung, and Intel are difficult to unravel and layered on top of one another, “a complex structure of supply chains within supply chains, a zooming fractal of tens of thousands of suppliers, millions of kilometers of shipped materials and hundreds of thousands of workers included within the process even before the product is assembled on the line.”327 A typical smartphone could have tens of thousands of individual components, sourced from hundreds of different companies, that snake their way through a sprawling network of miners, smelters, traders, shippers, and manufacturers in dozens of different jurisdictions. For example, the Apple A12 chip, designed in Cupertino, California, may be sourced from chip fabrication facilities in Taiwan, operated by a company like TSMC. From there, the chip may be packaged and tested by a company called Amkor, in the Philippines, and from there shipped to the Foxconn assembly plants in China before then being shipped around the world after assembly to wherever the consumers are located. Tracking the individual components of such a supply chain to ensure compliance with labour and environmental safeguards is extremely challenging for even the most well-intentioned company.

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See Innis, Harold; McLuhan, Marshall Total S.A., 241 Tracking GhostNet (Citizen Lab), 204 Traffic & Conversion Summit, 101 TripleLift, 60 Trudeau, Justin, 192 Trump, Donald, 3, 182, 287 as false information source, 4, 110, 120, 268, 269 social media use, 110–111, 269, 303 Trump, Donald, Jr., 88 Trump, Melania, 110 tsmc Co., 227 Tubaigy, Salah Muhammed, 137 Turkmenistan, 150–151, 192 23andMe, 71–72 Twitter, 2, 28, 48, 107, 111 activism on, 138, 139, 142, 156–157 data retrieval from, 183, 189–190 false information on, 84, 110, 126, 131, 140–142 UC Browser (app), 68–69 Ukraine, 82–83 United Airlines, 59 United Arab Emirates (uae), 149–152, 171 United Fruit Co., 116 United Kingdom, 3, 82, 118 Government Communications Headquarters, 43–44 United Nations, 279, 325, 326 United States.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

By applying or removing small voltages of electrical current and electromagnetic pressure, we can flip that switch on and off as we choose, and so let the current flow or not as we choose. Right now, in the semiconductor fabricators of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the machines that it has bought (from ASML Holding in the Netherlands and Applied Materials in Silicon Valley) and installed and programmed are carving thirteen billion such semiconductor solid-state switches with attached current and control paths onto a piece of a wafer that will become a crystal silicon “chip” about two-fifths of an inch wide and two-fifths of an inch tall. TSMC’s marketing materials imply that the smallest of the carved features is only twenty-five silicon atoms wide.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

The External Effects of EU Environmental Legislation on the United States, 241 (2011). 65.Id. 66.Id. 67.Hitachi Group to Eliminate 6 Chemical Substances Targeted in RoHS by March 2005 Shifting to Lead-Free Solder by March 2004 in Japan and by March 2005 Worldwide, Hitachi (Dec. 1, 2003), http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/031201.html [https://perma.cc/N5TA-NANJ]. 68.Id. 69.Top 15 Semiconductor Sales Leaders—2018F, AnySilicon (Nov. 12, 2018), https://anysilicon.com/top-15-semiconductor-sales-leaders-2018f/ [https://perma.cc/8VB5-6LPS]. 70.Corporate Social Responsibility Report, TSMC 48 (2017), https://www.tsmc.com/download/csr/2018_tsmc_csr/english/pdf/e_all.pdf [https://perma.cc/FN3K-MNKM]. 71.MediaTek is a fabless semiconductor company that provides system-on-chip solutions for wireless communications, HDTV, DVD and Blu-ray, and cell phone. Corporate Social Responsibility Report, MediaTek 139 (2015), https://d86o2zu8ugzlg.cloudfront.net/mediatek-craft/reports/CSR/2015-MediaTek-Corporate-Sustainability-Report-Final.pdf (last visited Feb. 7, 2017) [https://perma.cc/E6VX-M4EA]. 72.Overcome ROHS, EU’s First Environmental Regulation, Sci.

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

State-owned companies were successful in the steel industry in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, steadily raising the quality of output in an industry that seems given to bureaucratic-style public sector control. In Taiwan’s state-dominated industrial policy, public firms such as United MicroElectronics and TSMC were also successful in getting to and remaining at the forefront of many types of semiconductor production. However, Taiwan and the rest of north-east Asia had plenty of examples of state firm failure – or at least underperformance compared with private companies. In Taiwan and Korea, for instance, state-owned shipbuilders failed to keep pace with private ones.

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See Tibor Scitovsky, ‘Economic Development in Taiwan and South Korea’, in L. Lau, ed., Models of Development: A Comparative Study of Economic Growth in South Korea and Taiwan (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Affairs, 1986), p.160. 64. The best known are United MicroElectronics, which is state-controlled but with five private partners, and TSMC, the government joint venture with Holland’s Philips which in 1986 invested in a first ASICs foundry in Taiwan. See Wade, Governing the Market, p. 103. 65. See Kuo et al., The Taiwan Success Story, p. 109. The authors calculated that exports accounted for 22.5 per cent of increased manufacturing production in 1956–61 and 68 per cent in 1971–6. 66.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

Unlike people, sensors work tirelessly, never needing sleep and never demanding a raise. They notice changes where humans miss them, thus ensuring labels are correctly affixed to bottles moving through a factory assembly line. They are used in nuclear power plants for early detection of leaks. Some semiconductor foundries, such as TSMC in Taiwan, are attempting to build what’s known as “lights-out factories,” where sensors will eliminate the need for any employees at all. Unconfirmed reports indicate they are coming close. By the early 1990s, sensors had become so inexpensive and so collectively powerful when used in networks that engineers were starting to believe the number of ways and places they could be useful was almost limitless.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

As you read in the previous chapter, Apple got its boards stuffed at unregulated low piece rates by contracted immigrant employees, and Apple was far from alone. An estimated one-third of the region’s Indochinese immigrant population was employed assembling printed wire boards in the 1990s, a whopping 40,000 people.25 The increasing sophistication of Taiwanese contract manufacturers—led by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which was founded by former Texas Instruments employee and Stanford electrical engineering PhD Morris Chang in 1987—also allowed firms to outsource progressively more work. In China, Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market policies allowed the Taiwanese contractors to “onshore” production to the mainland in turn, where firms enjoyed the privileges that came with the People’s Republic’s first capitalist production enclaves.

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vii In 1986, the Treasury Department imposed a record $4.75 million fine on Bank of America for failing to report cash transactions across its California branches as required by anti-laundering regulations. Nathaniel C. Nash, “Bank of America Is Told to Pay U.S. $4.75 Million Fine,” New York Times, January 22, 1986. viii Coincidentally, Knight overlapped at Stanford with TSMC founder Morris Chang. Though their firms came to represent different moments in the globalization sequence, we can recognize them as two principals in the same ballet. ix Zimbardo does not seem to consider that passersby correctly assumed that the graduate students had permission from the owner to destroy the car for some inscrutable scientific purpose related to the university and that they were not engaged in any criminal or even (directly) antisocial conduct.

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The comparison treats the factory as a total environment, like a state. Normally the workplace is only one part of a person’s life, making the numbers difficult to compare. Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (Little, Brown, 2017), 272. iii A Taiwanese onshoring contractor with Western shareholders, like TSMC, doesn’t have the same problems, though in this case it was their chips being blocked. Bob Davis and Katy Stech Ferek, “U.S. Moves to Cut Off Chip Supplies to Huawei,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2020. iv This transition has been most visible in electronics, but it’s not exclusive. In a 2021 essay, James Meek examines wind tower factories in Glasgow, Scotland, and Phu My, Vietnam, both owned by the same South Korean company.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

By acting as a lead customer (often paying on a cost-plus basis), they effectively funded America’s businesses to invest in the intangibles needed to produce and sell chips, an investment that proved valuable when the businesses expanded into commercial markets. The Taiwanese government’s support for its nascent semiconductor industry in the 1970s and 1980s (particular through its technology agency ITRI) worked similarly: ITRI did not just invest in R&D, it incubated companies like UMC and TSMC, investing in the intangibles they needed to run semiconductor foundries effectively and link them to the global semiconductor supply chain. The success rate of industrial policy in supporting infant industries is an open question; but to the extent that it works, it is an example of government investment in non-R&D public intangibles.

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation
by Sebastien Page
Published 4 Nov 2020

When the commodities supercycle was in full swing, in mid 2008, energy and materials accounted for more than a third of MSCI EM market capitalisation and tech companies just a tenth. Last month, the commodities group was barely an eighth of EM market cap, and tech companies more than a quarter. This should be no surprise. EM tech companies include the Chinese internet trio of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu and longer-established names such as Hon Hai and TSMC of Taiwan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea.6 Emerging markets stocks have become more “high tech” and less commodity-dependent. Consumer sectors have also become more prominent. Like the S&P 500, all else being equal, the asset class should be more resilient to traditional economic downturns than in the past.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

(May 25, 2022), https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-says-america-will-defend-taiwan/; see generally Jessica Chen Weiss, The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition, Foreign Affs., Sep./Oct. 2022, at 10. 212.John Lee & Jan-Peter Kleinhans, Would China Invade Taiwan for TSMC?, Diplomat (Dec. 15, 2020), https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-for-tsmc/. 213.Henry & Carney, supra note 22. 214.Chen Bo (陈波), Maoyizhan Kaida Sannianduo, Meiguo Dalege Jimo (贸易战开打三年多，美国打了个“寂寞”) [The Trade War Has Been Going for Three Years, but U.S. Has Gained Nothing], Zhongguo Ribao Zhongwen Wang (中国日报中文网) [China Daily Chinese] (Oct. 19, 2021), https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202110/09/WS61619205a3107be4979f1989.html (China). 215.Thomas J.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

Table 1.1: Market Capitalisation of the World’s Top Tech Companies Company Market Cap (billion) Employees Apple 673.91 50,250 Microsoft 406.36 128,000 Google 364.27 53,861 Alibaba 285.14 22,072 Facebook 206 8,348 Oracle 182.22 122,000 Intel Corp 165.6 107,600 IBM 162.38 431,212 Cisco 135.86 74,040 Qualcomm 116.99 31,000 TSMC 112.19 40,483 SAP 83.29 263,000 2894.21 1,331,866.00 Source: NASDAQ stock quotes Tech companies are very efficient producers of profit compared with other large listed companies. Walmart, for example, has a market cap that is below Alibaba’s but employs more than 1.4 million Americans alone.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

See also cloud game streaming; specific streaming services Stripe, 217 subscription apps, 187n subscription fees, 176, 270–71 Subspace, 82 Super Mario Bros., 8, 32, 75, 98 Super Mario Odyssey, 30, 32 Sushiswap, 223 sustainability, 125, 182, 209–10, 222–23 Sweeney, Tim, 12, 19, 44, 96 on advertising in the Metaverse, 264 on Apple, 22–23, 184 on blockchains and the Metaverse, 234–35 “critical mass of working pieces,” 244–48 on powerful companies controlling the Metaverse, 285, 289 on the scope of the Metaverse, 14, 119–20 “Sweeney’s Law,” 100–101, 181–82 on the timeline of the Metaverse, 239, 245 see also Epic Games; Fortnite; Unreal game engine tablets, xi failed Apple Newton tablet, 145 “iPad Natives,” 13, 249 iPads, xi, 294 lidar scanning, 159–60 techno-capitalists, xiii, 22 TeleGeography, 85, 130 Tencent, 19, 24, 166 “hyper-digital reality,” xii, 7n, 239, 307n lawsuit over game item trading, 128 use of facial recognition, xiii WeChat, 205–6, 209, 214, 303–4 Tesla, 101, 166, 271 3D, 29–30, 33–36, 58 avatars, 40, 124, 144 common standards for, 135–40, 248 immersive, 30, 37 isometric (2.5D), 9, 30 objects, 36, 40–41, 248, 299 televisions, xiv, 5 “3D internet,” 34 TikTok, 28, 34, 116, 298 Time magazine, 66, 73 Tinder, 19, 215, 255, 259, 261, 308 Tivoli Cloud, 193 T-Mobile, 212 Tonic Games Group, 137 Top Policy Group, x Totem AR headset, 144 TouchWiz OS, 213 trolls and trolling, 129, 229, 291 “Trouble with Bubbles, The,” 5 TSMC, 166 Twitch, 50, 135, 179, 278, 298 Twitter, 92, 129, 138, 229, 287, 300 2001: A Space Odyssey, xi, 305 ultra-wideband (UWB) chips, 160 “uncanny valley,” 82–83 Uncensored Library, 11 Uniform Resource Locator (URL), 38–39 Uniswap, 223, 233 United Nations, 243 United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 16, 165 Unity game engine, xii, 20–21, 62, 66–67 appeal of, 106–9, 131–32, 175–76 competitors to, 278 developer licensing with, 106–7 Facebook and, 276–77 financial dimensions of, 113, 115–19, 122n, 214 Google Cardboard and, 142 interoperability and, 107, 122n, 136 use in animation and film, 118–19, 257–59 use in engineering and design, 31, 118, 136 see also Riccitiello, John Universal Scene Description (USD), 136, 160 Unreal game engine, 12, 62, 66–67 appeal of, 105–10, 131–32, 175–76 competitors to, 278 developer licensing with, 106–7, 181, 284–85, 297 financial dimensions of, 113, 116–17 interoperability and, 107, 122n, 136 Live Link Face app, 159 use in animation and film, 118–19, 257–58 use in engineering and design, 118, 136, 266 see also Epic Games; Fortnite Unreal Tournament 1, 101 Upland, 115 US Air Force Research Laboratory, 65 US Army, 144, 267–78 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 251–52 US Department of Defense, x, 296 user acquisition, 191 user-generated content, 24 user interfaces brain-to-computer interfaces (BCIs), xi, 154–55, 204–5 haptic feedback/interfaces, 151–52, 252, 261, 291–92 input delay, 80–84 skeuomorphism in, 47, 307 US Federal Reserve, 168–70, 302 US Securities and Exchange Commission, xii Valve, 177–79, 181–82, 225, 247.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

[It] delivers at least 30 percent and sometimes more than 50 percent of the entire U.S. consumption of products ranging from soaps and detergents to compact discs and pet food; The world’s supply of iron ore is controlled by three firms (Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton); A few immense firms like Mexico’s Cemex control the world’s supply of cement; Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators; Nike imports up to 86 percent of certain shoe types in the United States—for basketball, for instance—and more than half of many others; As of March 2009, Google had captured 64 percent of all online sear/fony ches in the United States; TSMC and UMC have together captured 60 percent of the world’s demand for semiconductor foundry service—in which a company serves as a sort of printing press for chips that are designed and sold by other firms—and have concentrated that business mainly in one industrial city in Taiwan; Corning has captured a whopping 60 percent share of the business of supplying [LCD glass].13 These are just market concentration statistics.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

In April 2020 the ban of the purchase of Huawei equipment came into full effect. Then in May, the U.S. Commerce Department dramatically raised the stakes by requiring a license for anyone using American equipment to produce chips for sale to Huawei. The leading chip foundries in Asia, South Korean Samsung and Taiwanese TSMC, would have to choose between access to state-of-the-art U.S. manufacturing equipment and their giant markets in China.80 To go one step further, in September the Commerce Department widened the sanctions from Huawei to SMIC, China’s leading manufacturer of microchips. At the same time, it exerted pressure on European governments and businesses to cease delivery of essential chip-making equipment to SMIC.81 There was an “unacceptable risk,” the United States declared, that equipment would find its way into the hands of the Chinese military.