Foundry father

Even in the very anomalous category of tech entrepreneurs who´ve become pop stars, Morris Chang is an anomaly. He´s 79 years old, and unlike Steve Jobs, who makes stylish consumer gear, or Mark Zuckerberg, who runs the world´s largest social network and is the subject of a major motion picture, Morris Chang runs a semiconductor foundry. It´s a big one, to be sure: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), in Hsinchu, is by far the world´s largest foundry company, with annual revenues last year of about US $13.3 billion. And yet, the foundry business isn´t what most people would regard as the glamour sector of the semiconductor industry-a foundry is basically a fab-for-hire. Companies create their own designs and pay the foundry to manufacture the chips.