The Chip Insider®– TSMC 2025 Technology Symposium

Sometimes conferences are more than just one-off events. Sometimes they become major milestones that mark fundamental industry transitions. One must stop and survey how the strategic landscape has changed to comprehend the next moves. At last year's symposium, TSMC seemed to be becoming more than just a technology leader... Last year, TSMC was on the cusp of becoming the strategic leader for the industry. As the year played out, the strategic leader holding the crown fell back … the symbolic crowning would not occur until Monday, March 3, 2025, when President Trump hosted TSMC CEO, C.C. Wei, in the White House to announce a historic $100B plan to build fabs in the United States... The symbolism didn’t end there…

As the symposium opened on April 23… The bigger picture reflected in this transition is that over the last four decades, TSMC has restructured the semiconductor industry from highly vertical structures, which competed against each other on all levels, to a flat structure of open friend-and-foe competition based on … At TSMC’s 2025 Technology Symposium the news was that there was no news. The only news in TSMC’s new nodes was their names and that TSMC was continuing to deliver on its promise to make significant gains in PPA (Power, Performance, and Area). Moreover they have no plans to change these promises. Many were predicting that PPA gains were gone and Moore's Law with it. What is monumental about TSMC's new 14A is that its PPA gain specs are essentially the same as N2.

Another point of no-news news is increasing NTO counts (New Tape Outs) with N2, as the growth trend in NTOs continues. You may remember all the pundit forecasts that NTOs would decline because design had become too expensive... This hasn’t been the case…This shift from cost to value is the driving force behind TSMC’s focus on Foundry 2.0, which is something you may remember me calling the chiplet foundry model.

To understand why it’s coming from the foundry side and not the OSAT side, consider Carl Von Clausewitz's famous comment that “War is merely the continuation of diplomacy by other means.” With that in mind, Foundry 2.0 is merely the continuation of wafer fabrication by advanced packaging. With it, TSMC is reinventing the foundry business… This is a radically different world for the semiconductor industry going forward.

“Cost is important… Value is decisive” – G. Dan Hutcheson