[sosodev]

TSMC. They dominate the semiconductor market because they're consistently first to market with the world's most advanced chip fabrication.

[ceejayoz]

But they're an example of the same phenomeon; they were founded in 1987, long after chip fabrication was a thing. They just did it right.

[bigyabai]

They took extreme risks on EUV lithography and accumulated market share by being the first to shrink nodes.

[sosodev]

I think it's hard to know where to draw the line between derivative product and something unique. If we follow your logic that TSMC hasn't done anything new, then aren't all computer manufacturers just rehashing the ENIAC or whatever? Is a Tesla just a better model T? No, arguably we would say that these products are new to market because they've integrated new technologies in unique ways and often expended massive capital on R&D to do so. TSMC is no different.

[AndrewKemendo]

Absolutely not TSMC was and has always been a pure play “execution” of chip foundry, based on the government of Taiwan taking financial bets on a growing chip market.

In no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.

In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC

If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…

[grumbelbart2]

TSMC had the first copper interconnects, kind of their breakthrough node at the time, and the first EV-based process.