Morris Chang

Morris Chang (Chang Chung-mou, born 1931) founded TSMC in Taiwan in 1987. More than half of his career, though, was spent inside the American semiconductor industry. When he started TSMC he was past 55 and had already spent twenty-five years at Texas Instruments.

Thirty years in the United States

According to the Computer History Museum (CHM), Chang was born in Ningbo, China, in 1931. He holds bachelor's (1952) and master's (1953) degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford (1964).

CHM writes that under his leadership TI became the world's leading producer of integrated circuits. The sources disagree on when he moved to General Instrument: CHM says 1983, while English Wikipedia gives his tenure there as 1984–1985.

TSMC was less a personal start-up than an extension of his job running a research institute. CHM says that at ITRI he focused on using technology to advance Taiwan's wider social and economic goals, and that it was in this capacity that he founded TSMC.

Chief executive, twice

English Wikipedia records that Chang was CEO from 1987 to 2005, when he handed the post to Rick Tsai. Then, on 11 June 2009, TSMC's board re-elected him chairman and appointed him CEO concurrently, effective 12 June. Tsai moved to head a new business development organisation. Chang's explanation, in the Form 6-K of the day, was that the company needed to develop long-term growth opportunities, and that he had asked Tsai to devote all his energy to that task.

TSMC's 2017 announcement states that Mark Liu and C.C. Wei had been co-CEOs since 2013. Chang's second spell as chief executive therefore lasted about four years, from 2009 to 2013.

2018 — retiring as chairman

On 2 October 2017 Chang announced his own retirement. He would step down immediately after the annual shareholders' meeting in early June 2018, would not serve on the next board and would take no part in management. From then on the company would be led jointly by Mark Liu as chairman and C.C. Wei as chief executive. In the same announcement he said:

The past 30-odd years, during which I founded and devoted myself to TSMC, have been an extraordinarily exciting and happy phase of my life.

In 2018, the year he left, TSMC also began volume production of its 7 nm process (N7). The founder's departure coincided with the company taking the lead at the most advanced process nodes.

Recognition

In 2011 the IEEE awarded Chang its Medal of Honor, "For outstanding leadership in the semiconductor industry." The citation names no invention; it recognises the leadership of an industry.

Many founders in computing history are remembered for a product. What Chang built was a company with no products of its own. As CHM explains it, an independent factory open to anyone let both start-ups and established chipmakers avoid building their own very expensive fabs and compete instead on circuit and product design. The man who started that arrangement was an engineer who had spent twenty-five years at a major American chipmaker.