Morris Chang

Morris Chang is a Taiwanese American businessman, and the founder, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's first and largest silicon foundry. He is known as the semiconductor industry founder of Taiwan.

Chang was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang. When he was younger, he had wanted to become a novelist or journalist. However, his father, an official in the Ningbo county government, persuaded him otherwise. In 1948, as China was in the height of the Chinese Civil War, a year before People’s Republic of China established, Chang moved to Hong Kong.

The very next year he moved yet again to the United States to attend Harvard University. He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1952 and 1953, respectively. After leaving MIT without obtaining a PhD, he was hired by Sylvania Semiconductor, then just known as a small semiconductor division of Sylvania Electric Products, in 1955. Three years later, he moved to Texas Instruments in 1958, which was then rapidly rising in its field. After three years at TI, he rose to manager of the engineering section of the company. It was then, in 1961, that TI decided to invest in him by giving him the opportunity to obtain his PhD degree, which he received in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1964.

During his 25-year career (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments, he rose up in the ranks to become the group vice president responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor business. He left TI to become president and chief operating officer of General Instrument Corporation (1984–1985).

Chang worked on a four-transistor project for TI where the manufacturing was done by IBM. This was one of the early semiconductor foundry relationships. Also at TI, Morris pioneered the then controversial idea of pricing semiconductors ahead of the cost curve, or sacrificing early profits to gain market share and achieve manufacturing yields that would result in greater long-term profits.[citation needed]

However, after he left General Instrument Corporation, the government of Republic of China recruited him to become chairman and president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute. As head of a government-sponsored non-profit, he was in charge of promoting industrial and technological development in Taiwan. Chang founded TSMC in 1987, the beginning of the period where firms increasingly saw value in outsourcing their manufacturing capabilities to Asia. Soon, TSMC became one of the world's most profitable chip makers. Chang left ITRI in 1994 and became chairman of Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation from 1994 to 2003 while continuing to serve as chairman of TSMC. In 2005, he handed TSMC's CEO position to Rick Tsai.