When I was in Taiwan for CDNLive Taiwan, I visited the TSMC Museum of Innovation, which is near TSMC's headquarters in Hsinchu (and also near the Cadence Taiwan office). If you are interested in visiting yourself, I'll put all the details at the end of this post. But do take note that you need to book in advance, although you don't need a special invitation from anyone at TSMC.

As it happens, I'm very interested in the history of technology, and the fabless/foundry revolution in particular. In fact, with Dan Nenni, I wrote a book about it (and TSMC's Cliff Hou wrote the foreword). We actually revised it this year, so there is now a 2019 edition available. Or at least there will be soon once the final editing has been completed. I'll put a post here on Breakfast Bytes with a link to the PDF once it is available for download (yeah, it's a labor of love so it's free).

That interest in history has taken me to several museums of technology and computers. For posts on other museums, see:

• German Computer Museums
• British Computer Museums
• The Computer History Museum
• Four Early Computers 1&2 and Four Early Computers 3&4
• The Intel Museum
• The San Jose Tech Museum
• Heinz Nixdorf's Legacy in Paderborn
• The Mercedes Benz Museum and the Invention of the Automobile
  

The Founding of TSMC

A couple of the most interesting exhibits at the museum are two sets of foils. That's what we called transparent sheets for putting on an overhead projector back in that era. This was before projectors and before PowerPoint. The two documents below are the presentation Morris Chang made to the Taiwanese Government in 1985, and the presentation made to investors in 1986.

When TSMC was created, it was 48% (approximately) owned by the Taiwan Government and 27% owned by Philips. Actually not Philips Semiconductors, but the parent company of the whole organization which has the wonderful name Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken (incandescent bulb manufacturer). Another 10 Taiwan companies invested the remaining 24%.

Another key part of getting the company launched was a hand-drawn diagram Morris Chang drew showing how a pure-play foundry would work. It's really hard to see in the above photo (sorry, I only had my phone) so here is a clean version of it:

The first CEO was not Morris Chang, but Jim Dykes. If you want to see an investor presentation by him about a year after TSMC's founding, see my post TSMC 30 Years Ago Today. One quote from that presentation could have been written by TSMC today:

COMPANIES AND THEIR FOUNDRIES WILL SHARE CAPITAL PLANS AND PROCESS TECHNOLOGY STREAMS. COMPANIES AND THEIR FOUNDRIES WILL OBJECTIVELY EXCHANGE TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE...RESULTING IN FASTER AND BETTER ENGINEERING DECISIONS. SOPHISTICATED CUSTOMERS WILL ESTABLISH DEDICATED INTERNAL ORGANIZATIONS TO MANAGE FOUNDRY QUALIFICATION AND PRODUCTION. THESE NEW AND STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS WILL SET A PATTERN FOR THE SUCCESSFUL USE OF FOUNDRIES IN THE FUTURE.

In fact, TSMC's mission is one of the first things you see when you enter the museum.

Fabs

TSMC's first fab was leased from the Taiwanese government and was eventually returned to them. Since then, TSMC has had many fabs and one fact I still find amazing is that TSMC has never closed a fab. When they cease to be leading-edge, they get repurposed to manufacture specialist processes. The small picture looking nothing like a fab is that first leased Fab 1.

One of the great things about the museum, for me anyway, is that there are a lot of photos. I've never been able to find a photo of fab 1 before. Although at events like the Technology Symposium and the OIP Forum the presentations often include lots of pictures of fabs, the presentations are not made available and so finding appropriate images for blog posts is hard. (Okay, that's probably more of a problem for me than for you, since you're probably not a writer.)

By contrast, the picture below, from the museum, is the fab complex in Tainan (in the south of Taiwan).

Morris Chang

One whole gallery in the museum is dedicated to the story of Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC. He is not from Taiwan, he is from Zhejiang in mainland China. He went to Harvard for a year, then transferred to MIT where he got is Bachelors and Masters. He worked for Texas Instruments for 25 years, eventually running the whole semiconductor division. During that period, he also did a PhD at Stanford. After a sojourn at General Instrument, he was recruited to run ITRI, the (Taiwan) Industrial Technology Research Institute.

Then, in 1985/6 he developed the ideas for a pure-play foundry, and raised money, with TSMC finally opening its doors in February 1987. He was CEO until 2005, and again from 2009 until he finally retired on June 5 last year, aged 87.

Visiting

Anyone can visit, you don't need a special invitation. But you do need to register, at the latest by noon the day before you want to visit. You can register up to a month in advance. The museum is open Mondays to Fridays from 9:00am to 5:30pm, and on Saturdays from 10:00am to 5:30pm. It is closed on Sundays and holidays. However, it is closed from September 16 until November for what is described as annual maintenance. I expect that there will be some changes to the exhibits when it re-opens.

The address is No. 1, Li Hsin Rd. 7, Hsinchu Science Park. Their website also says that it is at GPS: E: 121° 57.7" N: 24° 46'27.9"

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.