TSMC Chairman Chang: Global Semiconductor Sector to Face Technical Hurdles Soon

Over the next five to 10 years the global semiconductor industry faces major technical hurdles, from the bottleneck in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology for sub-7nm processes and growing inapplicability of  “Moore’s Law” to semiconductor industry, said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) Chairman Morris Chang at the award ceremony in early December in Taichung, central Taiwan, where he was the fourth recipient of the Visionary Award presented by the SPIE-International Society of Optical Engineering, founded in 1955 in the United States.

Moore’s Law, postulated by Intel Co-Founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965, estimates the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit to double approximately every two years.

Chang is often praised as “Godfather of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry” and has built a behemoth supplier of built-to-order chips. He said TSMC  has significantly changed the global semiconductor industry in terms of boosting global IC design by providing designers dedicated manufacturing capacity and advanced process technologies.

In the last 25 years the world’s key innovations and inventions in  semiconductors as chips inside mobile phones are mostly the work of IC design houses rather than integrated device manufacturers. (KL)