TAIPEI -- In the sweltering Asia summertime of mid-June, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. urgently dispatched a team to Japan to visit some of the company's equipment suppliers. Why, it wanted to know, were these companies saying they could not deliver vital machines on time? TSMC is the world's largest chip manufacturer, and its suppliers had always bent over backward to provide what the powerful company was demanding, but for the first time, it was being met with apologetic messages.
Chipmaking requires hundreds of machines, materials and chemicals. In this TSMC plant in Taiwan, an engineer in protective clothing holds a Front Opening Unified Pod (FOUP) for transferring the wafers used in chips safely between machines. © Photo courtesy of TSMC
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