Morris Chang had decades of experience before launching a revolutionary chip maker
“The seeds of a pure chip foundry had been planted in his mind by Gordon Campbell, a semiconductor entrepreneur who visited Chang during his otherwise regrettable year at General Instrument. Campbell was familiar with the agonies and the inefficiencies of building and operating a fab. He felt startups were better off designing chips and outsourcing the manufacturing. To some in his business, this was unthinkable. “Real men have fabs,” the famous saying went. One man thought the future was fabless. “People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” He was thinking about it when he spoke with Chang in late 1984. And soon Chang was thinking about it, too. He began to think that every fabless company would need a foundry.”
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