Vendor lineage
TSMC - the factory behind most of the silicon on this site
The first pure-play semiconductor foundry, founded 1987, manufacturing designs it does not own.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang as a company that fabricates other companies’ semiconductor designs and competes with none of them. It is the largest contract chipmaker in the world.
It belongs on this timeline for a reason that has nothing to do with networking products and everything to do with why they exist. The merchant switching silicon that most equipment on this site forwards packets with is designed by companies that own no factories. Somebody has to build those chips, and for most of them it is this company.
The arrangement is recorded in the making milestones here, because it is a structural invention rather than a product: before a foundry existed, designing a chip meant owning a fabrication plant, and only very large companies designed chips. Afterwards, a team with a design and a purchase order could have silicon.
It is also the point at which a great deal of the world’s computing depends on a small number of buildings in one place, which is a fact about supply chains rather than about technology, and is why the subject now appears in industrial policy in several countries at once.
- TSMC (Wikipedia): Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, founded 1987 by Morris Chang, the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry and the largest contract chipmaker
- Fabless manufacturing (Wikipedia): the complementary model of designing and selling semiconductors while outsourcing fabrication