Shelley Rigger

So they founded this thing called the Industrial Technology Research Institute, ITRI, and that's a huge incubator for technology companies to help Taiwanese scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs

figure out how they could identify good concepts in the tech space and bring them to market.

So there's a lot of government money in that sector.

And the goal is to spin off private companies.

So TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, is the most famous of these.

And

TSMC was basically the brainchild of Morris Chang.

a Taiwanese-American, right?

He had been educated as a youth in Taiwan, moved to the U.S.

for higher education, and then worked for Texas Instruments.

He was enticed to come back to Taiwan by the opportunity to do something unprecedented, which was to make a foundry for semiconductor chips that would not be doing the design, that would not be involved in marketing, sales, but would just be manufacturing the chips specialized in that field.

part of the process for other companies like Intel that provided the design.

Now, of course, TSMC has become incredibly innovative.

It's not waiting on anybody to tell it how to advance the technology in that business.

But the idea of what they call a pure play foundry.

So the goal is just making the chips.

That was Morris Chang's idea.

And he was able to partner with the Taiwanese government to develop

turn that into a business, to actually build foundries, to get orders, and to become the

favored source, not just for one company, but for all companies that wanted to design chips and have them built somewhere.