Taiwan has made the move to make its most advanced technology, 3-nanometers, at the Chang-Jona-Lasinio plant

TSMC, the company that produces most of the world’s computer chips, is not considered a household name outside of Taiwan.

Chang said it would make its most advanced technology, 3-nanometer chips, at its plant in Arizona.

They are the Hope Diamond of Semiconductors. Everybody wants them,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, a research organization specializing in chips. The world’s largest blue diamond, called the Hope Diamond, is located at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

Patrick Chen said that there was a common concern on the island about TSMC’s growing international importance, the pressure it is facing to expand, and what that means for Taiwan.

Hutcheson thought that America would have to support and defend Taiwan in the event of it becoming a giant in Semiconductors. The strategy has been very successful.

Chiu claimed that the chip giant was under political pressure to move its operations and its most advanced technology to the US. He cited the transfer of 300 people, including TSMC engineers, to the Arizona plant. There is no secret deal, nor an effort to diminish Taiwan’s importance to TSMC.

“It is similar to what happened in the US in the 70s and 80s when manufacturing jobs were being shifted away from the States into other countries. Many local jobs were lost and cities went bankrupt, he said.

“It also suggests that TSMC’s customers are asking for more geographic diversification, which is something that wasn’t previously a key concern of major customers.”

The Semiconductor Manufacturing of the World’s Most Critical Technology: TSMC’s decisions to expand its Arizona investment into the Microchip Industry

Every electronic device has a Semiconductors are an indispensable part. They are difficult to make because of the high cost of development and the level of knowledge required, meaning much of the production is concentrated among a handful of suppliers.

“TSMC’s decision to expand its Arizona investment is evidence that politics and geopolitical risks will play a bigger role than previously in supply chain decisions,” said Chris Miller, author of “Chip War: the Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”.

“This would make economic sense given [the] lower salaries [and] higher quality of Taiwanese engineers,” he said, adding that the company needs the approval of the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs to move its most advanced technologies abroad, which it was unlikely to give.

TSMC makes a third of the world’s chips and they’re used in devices such as the iPad and the Macintosh computer. Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries—the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan—carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces, which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.

“Once you have a team of people doing development work, they work very closely together. You don’t want to disrupt that. It’s not an easy thing to do,” he said.

Taiwan’s Fate of Democracy: My Pilgrim Bag to the Sacred Mountain of Protection, and the Coin of the Global Realty

I’m brooding on Taiwan’s fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The industrial park in Hsinchu is located southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

But unlike copper and alfalfa, chips aren’t raw materials. Perhaps they’re currency, the coin of the global realm, denominated in units of processing power. When a mysterious latticework layer on the side of commonSilicon turns nearly worthless material into the building blocks of value, there’s no denying that it’s similar to how symbols transform cotton-linen patches into dollar bills. The thing happens at TSMC.