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Comment by cherryteastain | Hacker News Reader

The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was founded

That's such a good insight. It really was the SpaceX moment or maybe we can say SpaceX was the TSMC moment of space since TSMC came first.

1987?

As near as I can tell there was nothing particularly remarkable about TSMC in the 1980s or 1990s.

20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.

They weren't a startup for 20 years, they were a huge company with billion dollar fabs, thousands of workers, and they were exchanging technology lead with other silicon manufacturing companies many times (back before 2020s, mid/late 2010s, TSMC was not undisputed leader).

UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.

>UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.

What are you even talking about...

Same thing as everybody else in this thread, leading edge logic market.

Wasn't AMD or even Intel the same sort of "startups"?

Also what's so special about TSMC?

I mean they were doing quite well in the 90s and early 2000s before falling back behind Intel before they caught up and surpassed it this time.

Maybe the more generic claim is 'when pure-play foundry companies started earning more money than the "integrated device manufacturer" companies')

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry_model

Tesla and SpaceX both took time before they started generating positive cashflow.

It was one of the first foundries that focused on external ip and not producing its own chips

Or maybe Intel itself? AMD? Nvidia?

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