{"id":128403,"date":"2021-10-01T17:23:27","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T00:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/from-phones-to-cars-and-fridges-this-taiwan-firm-powers-the-world-but-success-brings-problems"},"modified":"2021-10-01T17:23:27","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T00:23:27","slug":"from-phones-to-cars-and-fridges-this-taiwan-firm-powers-the-world-but-success-brings-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/from-phones-to-cars-and-fridges-this-taiwan-firm-powers-the-world-but-success-brings-problems","title":{"rendered":"From Phones to Cars and Fridges, This Taiwan Firm Powers the World. But Success Brings Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/from-phones-to-cars-and-fridges-this-taiwan-firm-powers-the-world-but-success-brings-problems2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>On the northwest coast of Taiwan, nestled between mudflats teeming with fiddler crabs and sweet-scented persimmon orchards, sits the world\u2019s most important company that you\u2019ve probably never heard of. <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/collection-post\/5950050\/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing-corp\/\">Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co<\/a>., or TSMC, is the world\u2019s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips\u2014otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips\u2014that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/collection\/100-most-influential-people-2021\/6095971\/jensen-huang\/\">Nvidia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Inside its boxy off-white headquarters in sleepy Hsinchu County, technicians in brightly hued protective suits\u2014white and blue for employees, green for contractors and pink for pregnant women\u2014push polished metal carts under a sallow protective light. Above their heads, \u201cclaw machines\u201d\u2014nicknamed after the classic arcade game\u2014haul 9-kg plastic containers containing 25 individual slices, or \u201cwafers,\u201d of silicon on rails among hundreds of manufacturing stations, where they are extracted one by one for processing, much like a jukebox selecting a record. Only after six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing can each wafer be carved up into individual chips to be dispatched around the planet.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe always say that it\u2019s like building a high-rise,\u201d one TSMC section manager tells TIME, pointing to how his technicians diligently follow instructions dictated to them via tablet. \u201cYou can only build one story at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the northwest coast of Taiwan, nestled between mudflats teeming with fiddler crabs and sweet-scented persimmon orchards, sits the world\u2019s most important company that you\u2019ve probably never heard of. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, is the world\u2019s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips\u2014otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips\u2014that power our phones, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1512,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mobile-phones","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}