One day the founder and head of Advanced Micro Devices, Jerry Sanders, said: “Only real men have fabs”. Well, in this case the Big Three of the Asian chip manufacturers including TSMC, UMC and Chartered, really deserve being called “real men”, as they almost own the monopoly for production of chips of any possible complexity.

Of course, the biggest part of these chips are the chips for electronic appliances of all kinds, which production does not require top-end technologies. And the users of this equipment simply do not know anything about the manufacturers of the chips used in it, the same as any average car owner doesn’t actually know, which small company assembled the carburetor for his car.

The PC owners are usually more curious, although not all of them, of course. And surely they are not interested in everything. For example, not too many people care about the name of the DSP manufacturer in their hard disk drive. However, there is a special nomination where computer users are more or less familiar with the manufacturers’ names, so that they at least know who TSMC and UMC are. Of course, we are talking about NVIDIA and ATI graphics processors. Besides, AMD’s recent plans also suggest that the technical potential of these two independent manufacturers will also spread over the CPU field. So, who these two majors actually are? How did they grow to what they are today?

Of course, the leadership here belongs to TSMC. The company has made outstanding progress, especially keeping in mind that not so much time has passed since its foundation, even from the computer industry point of view. Here we should stress that we are talking about a manufacturer, and not about a developer, who doesn’t bear the burden of huge capital investments. But on the other hand, quite a bit of time has already passed: the company was founded 16 years ago in 1987. This time is more that enough either to make a company the world’s leader or to ruin it completely. Or both. A classical example here is the 3dfx Company.

So, in 1987 Morris Chung founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and he has been the head of its board of directors all this time. The goals set for this company in the beginning, haven’t changed since then, but they are no longer surprising to the public. While in those times, when the company had just been found, the idea of establishing a big enterprise focusing on production of other’s chips was pretty new. Before that, the companies which needed to produce certain chips had either to establish their own production facility or to place an order with the company, which already had free production capacities.

The first fab of this company founded in 1987 could work with 6-inch wafers and supposedly lasted very long. Although it is not mentioned in the official documents of this company, it nevertheless existed. Even in the middle of 2002 Texas Instruments informed its clients that their products will now be manufactured on TSMC Fab 2A, because TSMC Fab 1 was about to close down.