Dr. Morris Chang
speaker
200 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Morris Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Do you understand what I'm saying? Oh, yes.
Well, I wouldn't say that, okay, but I was really shocked. So I emailed Jeff Williams right away, and I said, you know, we invested in all this equipment, and we were counting on you to take the, 16 from us. But now, you know, we found out you were buying 16, the first 16, anyway, from Samsung. So Jeff replied immediately, don't worry, I'll be here, I'll be there, I'll be in Hsinchu next week.
and explain to you. So that made me, that relieved me a little, but certainly not completely. But next week, he did show up, and he explained to us. He said, well, as soon as you are ready, when you are 16, who will buy from you? Who will buy all of you? the needs from you when you're ready. Now, of course, that completely relieves me because that's what we're supposed to do anyway, you know.
So indeed, what he said was true. We developed, we had our own 16, about half a year later, and most of Apple's 60 nanometer requirements still belonged to us. Yeah, most, yeah.
I know. I know. It was, I said in the autobiography, you know, I mean, sitting in Hsinchu, Being in the foundry business, I actually see a lot of things before they actually happen. So let me tell you the IBM Qualcomm story.
Now, Qualcomm, we consider Qualcomm to be a prime company. candidate to be our customer. We really wanted Qualcomm because we knew they were a technology house. What year was this? This was way back, you know, when we started in the 90s anyway.
Yes. They started, Irwin Jacobs started Qualcomm actually before I started Qualcomm. TSMC. TSMC started in 1987. Qualcomm, I think, was a few years before that. So we are in the 90s, early 90s, all the way up to 1997 maybe. 96, 97, all the way up to the latter part of the 90s. We wanted a to be a customer. And I saw their operations VP.
That's what they call, that's what our customers call their purchasing people. Operations VP, operations senior VP. And I saw him often. And he was always pretty polite, but he gave us very little business. And I also knew that his main foundry was IBM. Now, sometime in the later 90s, I forgot whether it was 97 or 98, suddenly, he started, first he started to tell me that he would use us now.
He didn't even tell me who our competitor was, who our competitor had been, but I kind of knew that it was IBM from other sources of intelligence. And our business with Qualcomm, the business that Qualcomm gave us, pretty rapidly increased after that, after 97, 98 period. So I immediately knew that IBM Semiconductor was in trouble. Because, I mean, they had their own fabs and so on.
But their main business was really supplying to Qualcomm and a few other very small companies, very small, fabulous companies. So I immediately knew IBM was in trouble because they were losing Qualcomm. All right, so the next step that IBM took was not a surprise to me.
The next step they took was to ask us, TSMC, to co-develop the next generation of technology, which is 0.13 micron, 130 nanometer. In 1999. And since I anticipated that, it was no problem at all for us to refuse the... And in fact, even if I didn't anticipate that, we would never, never have accepted that kind of code development. I mean, IBM was still, you know...
they still consider themselves to be the senior partner in any partnership they establish. The senior partner. So we were, the company that co-developed something with them would send its engineers to IBM, you know. And when we do that, we lose our ability to develop our own processes. We'll have to depend on this co-development thing.
And the co-development thing is going to have a lot of difficulties, you know. Heck, you know, our people, you know, will be in a different culture. So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we were still a small Taiwan backward place, you know.
It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So they immediately went to UMC. And UMC accepted it. only to regret seriously their acceptance a few years later.
Smaller. They were smaller already, yeah. That's what I meant when I said that sitting here at the Foundry, I can see some things like this IBM thing.
I really did not devolve. I certainly did not initiate it. I think I had a role at TI. I had a role in refining it to the point where a semiconductor company can use it effectively. That's my role.
So how would you explain it to a novice? Well, explaining the learning curve theory is simple. But one would be foolish if one just takes the simple explanation and thinks that that's all it is. The simple explanation of learning curve is that as you make more of one thing, anything, Actually, it started with refrigerators and the cost. If a company makes more cost, then it's cost.
per car, unit cost goes down. That's why it's also called experience curve. You gain more experience, you become more efficient. That's a simple explanation. But if one just takes that simple explanation and thinks that's all it is about, then you really haven't Learn anything. All right. Anyway, the learning curve. Well, Bruce Henderson, who is now considered the father of strategies.
Yeah, he was the founder of Boston Consulting Group. And now, you know, I mean, there's a branch in business economics that's called competitive strategy or something. Competitive strategy, I guess. And Michael Porter was at one time considered a big figure in this competitive strategy. I mean, he wrote three or four books, big books, 700 pages each. I have all of them.
Yeah. I had a story about him in my autobiography, too, which, because of time, we probably won't go into. Not Michael Porter. But Bruce Henderson, we will talk about him. He is now considered to be the father of the competitive strategy. He came to Texas Instruments one day in, I think around 1970, or I should say he first called the T.I.
Showing 161–180 of 200 · page 9 of 10
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