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Chip Champion: The Triumph of TSMC and Taiwan
The Silicon Backbone of the Digital Age
“This book marks a significant milestone in the journey, offering both an authentic record and a moving account of a remarkable success story.”
Shang-Yi Chiang, TSMC’s former Co-Chief Operating Officer
“The author has witnessed numerous significant events in the semiconductor industry over the past thirty years … an indispensable read for anyone concerned with the industry.”
Stan Shih, Founder and Honorary Chairman of Acer Group
In a world increasingly defined by AI and technological innovation, one company stands at the critical nexus of global supply chains, geopolitical tensions, and cutting-edge TSMC.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has emerged as the world’s indispensable manufacturer of advanced semiconductor chips—the unseen yet essential components powering everything from smartphones and laptops to data centers and autonomous vehicles.
How did a company founded in an island nation of 23 million people become the world’s most valuable semiconductor firm and the producer of approximately 90% of its most advanced chips? What management philosophies, strategic decisions, and cultural practices enabled TSMC to outpace the once-dominant Intel? And perhaps most critically, how does this Taiwanese company navigate the increasingly turbulent waters of US–China tensions while sustaining its remarkable trajectory of innovation and growth?
Chip Champion takes readers inside the remarkable story of TSMC's rise to global dominance. Drawing on more than 30 years of extensive interviews with industry insiders, employees, and semiconductor experts, it provides unprecedented insight into how a Taiwanese manufacturing pioneer transformed itself into one of the world's most essential companies—one whose products now touch virtually every aspect of modern life.
As nations around the world scramble to secure semiconductor supply chains and build domestic chip manufacturing capacity, understanding TSMC's triumph is essential not just for business leaders and technology enthusiasts, but for anyone seeking to comprehend the complex forces shaping our digital future.
“This book marks a significant milestone in the journey, offering both an authentic record and a moving account of a remarkable success story.”
Shang-Yi Chiang, TSMC’s former Co-Chief Operating Officer
“The author has witnessed numerous significant events in the semiconductor industry over the past thirty years … an indispensable read for anyone concerned with the industry.”
Stan Shih, Founder and Honorary Chairman of Acer Group
In a world increasingly defined by AI and technological innovation, one company stands at the critical nexus of global supply chains, geopolitical tensions, and cutting-edge TSMC.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has emerged as the world’s indispensable manufacturer of advanced semiconductor chips—the unseen yet essential components powering everything from smartphones and laptops to data centers and autonomous vehicles.
How did a company founded in an island nation of 23 million people become the world’s most valuable semiconductor firm and the producer of approximately 90% of its most advanced chips? What management philosophies, strategic decisions, and cultural practices enabled TSMC to outpace the once-dominant Intel? And perhaps most critically, how does this Taiwanese company navigate the increasingly turbulent waters of US–China tensions while sustaining its remarkable trajectory of innovation and growth?
Chip Champion takes readers inside the remarkable story of TSMC's rise to global dominance. Drawing on more than 30 years of extensive interviews with industry insiders, employees, and semiconductor experts, it provides unprecedented insight into how a Taiwanese manufacturing pioneer transformed itself into one of the world's most essential companies—one whose products now touch virtually every aspect of modern life.
As nations around the world scramble to secure semiconductor supply chains and build domestic chip manufacturing capacity, understanding TSMC's triumph is essential not just for business leaders and technology enthusiasts, but for anyone seeking to comprehend the complex forces shaping our digital future.
267 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 1, 2025
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May 16, 2026
An inside look at one of critical companies that power modern life: TSMC. If you own stocks, you might know them by their ticker, TSM, or by Taiwan Semi if you watch CNBC. They make over 90 percent of advanced microprocessors, used in all electronics, including those used in AI.
The author, Owen Lin, majored in EE at a top 2 or 3 engineering school in Taiwan. Since Taiwanese people are lifelong friends with people they went to school with from kindergarten on, he inevitably knows a lot of people who work at TSMC he can interview. He also has a master's degree in economics (But don't get too excited; there's hardly any economic theory in the book). In fact, it's not academic at all. There are no footnotes. He wrote, as is popular to claim in Taiwan but denied by Samsung, that Samsung had a "kill Taiwan plan." He didn't assess the evidence for us, displaying a lack of scholarly rigor. He said, not incorrectly, that Morris Chang, the company founder, was the first to manufacture chips while someone else designs them. By doing manufacturing only, he started a a "fabless" revolution, where companies shifted to focusing on design while outsourcing manufacturing to TSMC. A "fab" is a semiconductor factory. What he didn't mention, was that Chang did not originate the idea; the concept of separating manufacturing and design is credited to Carver Mead's (Caltech) and Lynn Conway's (IBM) paper, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Chang might've been the first to try it.
This book won an award in Taiwan, but it hasn't warranted a hard printing in the USA. Its readability isn't world class; he often goes on for a long time without any dates (and dates are important in a constantly changing field like technology; something that's done in 2002 is very different from the same thing that gets done in 2014). The style flows fine, but I've seen him interviewed on Taiwan+ and he speaks with broken English grammar. The book doesn't list a translator, so I assume that the book was translated by an LLM. He doesn't give sufficient background for a lot of things (For example, how is the reader supposed to know what the "Monte Jade Science Association" is? A high school science club?).
I've been following the semiconductor industry for a while, so I didn't have much trouble following along despite the missing context. On the flip side, there also wasn't much new information in the first part of the book. But once you get past that, you get a deeper look into the company: its daily schedule, Mo Chang's social behavior, their board meetings, etc. As mentioned earlier, there isn't much economic theory in the book, but there is a TON of business management; descriptions of TSMC's quirky accounting practices, and references to Jim Collins and Michael Porter. Sometimes I wonder if his masters was in economics or business economics.
There was one economic idea that was included in this book: the middle income trap. It compared TSMC to Foxconn, a company that makes iPhones, and more emblematic of a traditional Taiwanese business. Because they don't own the name brand, and all they do is assembly, they make about $7 per $1000 iPhone. And Foxconn makes them in China and India, instead of Taiwan, because Taiwan's labor costs are too high. Yet many Taiwanese companies could not compete with those from wealthier countries on product quality. That's what economists call the "middle income trap."
In contrast to Foxconn, TSMC's margins are 60%. Their current CEO says they make about $600 per chip they sell to NVIDIA. If it's margins are 60% then that means they make $360 profit per microchip. TSMC—whose market capitalization is 45% the entire Taiwan's entire stock market—and its supplier companies have helped Taiwan break through the middle-income trap and join the club of wealthy nations. (Don't quote me on this, I have an idea of how finance works but I may not be precise or doing apples to apples.)
Another takeaway from the book concerns consequences of Taiwan's university networks. I mentioned before that Taiwanese are friends for life with their alums. Alums work for companies and their competitors across Shinzu (Taiwan's Silicon Valley); consequently, good information flows through the entire industry. And as Joe Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating, good information is necessary for markets to function.
The sexiest section of the book is, of course, on innovation. TSMC is, after all, a technology company. I won't spoil it for you, but Lin details the pivotal moments in its history: the decision to develop advanced chip nodes themselves instead of working with IBM, regaining technological leadership after a defector (Mong-song Liang) helped Samsung snatch it away, and the most interesting of all, dealing with the limits of Moore’s law.
Moore’s law, observed by former Intel CEO Gordon Moore, holds that transistors on a chip will double every two years, making the chip faster and less hungry for power. TSMC surpassed Intel in making the most powerful chip, but now it is running into a wall called the laws of physics. You can’t split an atom any smaller.
What TSMC did under its R&D chief Douglas Yu was invent a new method called CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) where you stack chips on top of each other, and you stack a memory chip alongside a processor (aka logic chip). Thereby it’s able to throw Moore’s law a lifeline.
Finally, fitting a logic chip alongside a memory chip has implications for the bitter rivalry between Taiwan and Korea. Because Taiwan leads in logic technology, and Korea leads in memory technology, that AI chips need both to go on the same chips means that the two rivals have a shared future.
The author is a writer for Taiwan’s Economic Daily News and covered the semiconductor industry, using both his degrees. This book was a decent product of his life’s work.
The author, Owen Lin, majored in EE at a top 2 or 3 engineering school in Taiwan. Since Taiwanese people are lifelong friends with people they went to school with from kindergarten on, he inevitably knows a lot of people who work at TSMC he can interview. He also has a master's degree in economics (But don't get too excited; there's hardly any economic theory in the book). In fact, it's not academic at all. There are no footnotes. He wrote, as is popular to claim in Taiwan but denied by Samsung, that Samsung had a "kill Taiwan plan." He didn't assess the evidence for us, displaying a lack of scholarly rigor. He said, not incorrectly, that Morris Chang, the company founder, was the first to manufacture chips while someone else designs them. By doing manufacturing only, he started a a "fabless" revolution, where companies shifted to focusing on design while outsourcing manufacturing to TSMC. A "fab" is a semiconductor factory. What he didn't mention, was that Chang did not originate the idea; the concept of separating manufacturing and design is credited to Carver Mead's (Caltech) and Lynn Conway's (IBM) paper, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Chang might've been the first to try it.
This book won an award in Taiwan, but it hasn't warranted a hard printing in the USA. Its readability isn't world class; he often goes on for a long time without any dates (and dates are important in a constantly changing field like technology; something that's done in 2002 is very different from the same thing that gets done in 2014). The style flows fine, but I've seen him interviewed on Taiwan+ and he speaks with broken English grammar. The book doesn't list a translator, so I assume that the book was translated by an LLM. He doesn't give sufficient background for a lot of things (For example, how is the reader supposed to know what the "Monte Jade Science Association" is? A high school science club?).
I've been following the semiconductor industry for a while, so I didn't have much trouble following along despite the missing context. On the flip side, there also wasn't much new information in the first part of the book. But once you get past that, you get a deeper look into the company: its daily schedule, Mo Chang's social behavior, their board meetings, etc. As mentioned earlier, there isn't much economic theory in the book, but there is a TON of business management; descriptions of TSMC's quirky accounting practices, and references to Jim Collins and Michael Porter. Sometimes I wonder if his masters was in economics or business economics.
There was one economic idea that was included in this book: the middle income trap. It compared TSMC to Foxconn, a company that makes iPhones, and more emblematic of a traditional Taiwanese business. Because they don't own the name brand, and all they do is assembly, they make about $7 per $1000 iPhone. And Foxconn makes them in China and India, instead of Taiwan, because Taiwan's labor costs are too high. Yet many Taiwanese companies could not compete with those from wealthier countries on product quality. That's what economists call the "middle income trap."
In contrast to Foxconn, TSMC's margins are 60%. Their current CEO says they make about $600 per chip they sell to NVIDIA. If it's margins are 60% then that means they make $360 profit per microchip. TSMC—whose market capitalization is 45% the entire Taiwan's entire stock market—and its supplier companies have helped Taiwan break through the middle-income trap and join the club of wealthy nations. (Don't quote me on this, I have an idea of how finance works but I may not be precise or doing apples to apples.)
Another takeaway from the book concerns consequences of Taiwan's university networks. I mentioned before that Taiwanese are friends for life with their alums. Alums work for companies and their competitors across Shinzu (Taiwan's Silicon Valley); consequently, good information flows through the entire industry. And as Joe Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating, good information is necessary for markets to function.
The sexiest section of the book is, of course, on innovation. TSMC is, after all, a technology company. I won't spoil it for you, but Lin details the pivotal moments in its history: the decision to develop advanced chip nodes themselves instead of working with IBM, regaining technological leadership after a defector (Mong-song Liang) helped Samsung snatch it away, and the most interesting of all, dealing with the limits of Moore’s law.
Moore’s law, observed by former Intel CEO Gordon Moore, holds that transistors on a chip will double every two years, making the chip faster and less hungry for power. TSMC surpassed Intel in making the most powerful chip, but now it is running into a wall called the laws of physics. You can’t split an atom any smaller.
What TSMC did under its R&D chief Douglas Yu was invent a new method called CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) where you stack chips on top of each other, and you stack a memory chip alongside a processor (aka logic chip). Thereby it’s able to throw Moore’s law a lifeline.
Finally, fitting a logic chip alongside a memory chip has implications for the bitter rivalry between Taiwan and Korea. Because Taiwan leads in logic technology, and Korea leads in memory technology, that AI chips need both to go on the same chips means that the two rivals have a shared future.
The author is a writer for Taiwan’s Economic Daily News and covered the semiconductor industry, using both his degrees. This book was a decent product of his life’s work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review