The Chip Titan Whose Life’s Work Is at the Center of a Tech Cold War

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The Chip Titan Whose Life’s Work Is at the Center of a Tech Cold War

 

By Paul Mozur and John Liu

Aug. 4, 2023, New York Times

 

 

Morris Chang에 대해서는 얼마 전에 Chris Miller, "Chip War"에서 인상적으로 읽었는데, 세 주 전쯤에 뉴욕 타임즈에 또 기사가 떴다.

 

 

Morris Chang (사진: 위 기사에서)

 

 

 

아래는 위 기사에서:

 

The insight that Mr. Chang gained from the textbook [“Introduction to VLSI Systems”] was deceptively simple: the idea that microchips, which act as the brains of computers, could be designed in one place but manufactured somewhere else. The notion went against the semiconductor industry’s standard practice at the time.

 

[A]t the age of 54 ... Mr. Chang ... left his adopted country, the United States, and moved to Taiwan where he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. The company does not design chips, but it has become the world’s biggest manufacturer of cutting-edge microprocessors for customers including Apple and Nvidia.

 

So critical are its airplane-hangar-size chip factories, called fabs, that the United States, Japan and Europe have courted TSMC to build them in their neck of the woods. Over the past decade, China has also invested hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate what TSMC has done.

 

“We control all the choke points,” Mr. Chang said, referring collectively to the United States and its chip-making allies such as the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. “China can’t really do anything if we want to choke them.”

[H]e built the company — and outmaneuvered giants like Samsung and Intel — by being meticulous, stubborn, trusting his best people and, crucially, having boundless ambition and making daring moves when justified.

In 2018, Mr. Chang, at 86 years old, retired again. By then, TSMC had succeeded where others lagged, mass producing chips with electronic pathways the size of a DNA double helix. That gave Mr. Chang confidence that he had achieved a key tenet for TSMC: technological leadership.

 

Mr. Chang helped spur the A.I. revolution in the United States. With TSMC’s manufacturing, Nvidia became the world’s most important A.I. chip designer. Breakthroughs like generative A.I. rely on huge numbers of Nvidia chips to find patterns in vast amounts of data.