As one of Taiwan's major integrated device manufacturers (IDM), Macronix shoulders the responsibility of Taiwan's future role in the memory industry. Miin Wu, chairman of Macronix, stressed in a recent forum that Macronix has been focused on quality since its inception. Macronix's product quality is superior to competitors' and it is especially so in high-end NOR flash. Wu stressed again that the future memory products will be a customized sector, and the application-driven technology will be the key to success. Solutions which are merged into the "system in memory" would strengthen customers' competitiveness. Etron chairman Nicky Lu, who has been in the memory business for years, also said that if you expect the memory sector to achieve a satisfactory outcome, you should take the packaging and testing industry into account. TSMC chairman Mark Liu also believes that Micron has surpassed Samsung in memory technology. Taiwan should not miss the opportunity, with Micron having a production base in central Taiwan.
Wu recalled his entrepreneurial experiences during the company's inception from zero, when he recruited dozens of top-notchers from the US to return to Taiwan in 1989 for developing in-house technology. This is a very different model of development from other ICT enterprises during the era when Taiwan's makers were dedicated to manufacturing. Combined with AI and big data, Macronix is a pioneer in the digitalization of wafer fabs.
Macronix survived and grew without back-up from any big business groups or Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Macronix managed to raise enough funds through public listing after receiving a greenlight from the government. This is a high-stakes industry where vision and courage of government officials are also a key success factor.
Taiwan has undergone two years of stress test during the pandemic and the US-China trade war, and has achieved a remarkable success thanks to the mutual support among the industry community. Tien Wu, CEO of ASE, remains highly upbeat about Taiwan's industrial prospects in the next five years. To address new challenges with greater leeway, the collaboration among IDMs, system manufacturers and design companies is crucial. At present, there isn't a consensus concerning this. Entrepreneurs' visions get greater, as the industrial scale expands. Unlike China's Internet startups, Taiwan's IT community selects semiconductors as the core industry to embark on a path that Taiwanese are good at.
Tien Wu talked about the significant changes in the industry in terms of qualitative and quantitative changes in semiconductor competition. The key to Taiwan's success lies in customers' trust. More importantly, Taiwan's customers are mostly focused on innovation, and they need Taiwan. The formation of the semiconductor market comes in two stages, said Wu. During the first stage it is relatively easy to estimate the market demand which comes from the early adopters. But once it enters the second stage where there are more players, and where production efficiency and cost are crucial to competitiveness, issues arising from the old manufacturing processes frequently would occur, even if the supply of material remains stable. Such a scenario was highlighted in the supply-and-demand disruption of automotive semiconductors in 2021. The traditional supply chain can easily adapt to temporary supply-and-demand imbalance during the introduction stage of a new product thanks to limited number of early adopters. But the production capacity adjustment of the mature process or the packaging and testing industry can't happen overnight.
The stakes and strengths of each country vary in this global race. No individual enterprise or country has the final say. Although makers of Taiwan and South Korea play a pivotal role, they still rely on equipment supply from other countries, so it has worried everyone when Japan stopped shipping semiconductor materials to South Korea, China makers scrambled for parts leading to supply-and-demand imbalance, and the US government and enterprises intervened in the supply-chain operation. The stakes are high in the promising semiconductor industry, but at the end of the day, everyone has realized that geopolitics is posing the greatest risk.
