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TSMC is leaving the gallium nitride (GaN) wafer foundry business and will stop GaN production by 31 July 2027, according to reports in early July 2025 that the company confirmed. GaN was a small, low-margin line for TSMC under heavy price pressure from Chinese foundries, and the company is putting the capacity and people towards advanced packaging and leading-edge nodes, where AI demand is strongest. This is a dated news post from 6 July 2025; a…
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Murugavel Ganesan
July 06, 2025
TSMC
Gate-all-around (GAA) transistors wrap the gate fully around stacked silicon channels (nanosheets or ribbons), giving better electrostatic control than FinFETs, whose gate covers only three sides of a fin. That control lets the transistor keep scaling with lower leakage and a tunable drive strength. Both Intel 18A (RibbonFET) and TSMC N2 are built on GAA, so the competition between them is decided less by the transistor type and more by yield, b…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 07, 2025
Video
On 24 October 2023, TSMC founder Morris Chang spoke at MIT about his career and how the semiconductor industry evolved, from his years at Texas Instruments to founding TSMC in 1987 and creating the dedicated foundry model. His main argument was that manufacturing strength depends on people and experience built up in one place, which he summed up as "learning is local." The full talk is embedded below. As part of the Manufacturing@MIT…
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Murugavel Ganesan
December 21, 2023
TSMC
In May 2020 TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, was reported to be preparing to build an advanced chip factory in Arizona, and on 15 May 2020 it confirmed the plan: a 5-nanometre fab costing about 12 billion US dollars, with production targeted for 2024. The move came as the US government grew concerned about its dependence on Asia for leading-edge chips. This post was written on 14 May 2020, the day before the announcement, and th…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 14, 2020
TSMC
In April 2020, Bloomberg reported that Apple was on track to start selling Macs with its own processors in 2021, using chips built by TSMC on a 5-nanometre process. The report turned out to be right about the direction and the factory, and a little cautious on timing. Apple announced the switch in June 2020 and shipped the first Macs with its own M1 chip in November 2020. The original news report and our notes from April 2020 follow, with an upd…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
April 24, 2020
