With Morris Chang’s pioneering vision and founding of TSMC, Dr. Chang enabled the rapid growth of the fabless sector and changed the landscape of the semiconductor industry. Imec’s award recognizes Dr. Chang’s profound and unparalleled impact on the global semiconductor industry, and will be presented to him in person on June 23, in Belgium at imec’s annual Imec Technology Forum in Brussels.

Dr. Chang founded TSMC in 1987 as a company solely dedicated to manufacturing chips according to customers’ designs. By not competing with customers, TSMC enabled entrepreneurs to build world-class businesses around designing and marketing chips without the need of a manufacturing facility.

By partnering for manufacturing capabilities, fabless companies can avoid the mammoth costs of operating their own semiconductor fabrication facility and focus on innovation of the circuits while leaving the manufacturing and yield challenges to their partners in foundry, and thereby accelerating innovation according to market needs. It is the world’s largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, and many of today’s largest high-tech companies can link their success directly to their partnership with TSMC.

“Chairman Chang is immensely respected in the global semiconductor community for his innovative vision and tireless drive to shape the future of technology,” stated Luc Van den hove, president and CEO at imec.

“Innovation is the cornerstone of economic growth and imec, as the nucleus of the global semiconductor industry for joint R&D on advanced technologies, is a proud partner of TSMC. We are greatly honored to welcome Chairman Chang to Belgium and to present him with this award, representing imec’s and its partners’ gratitude, respect, admiration and appreciation.”

Imec and TSMC have a long and fruitful history of collaboration. Since 2005, TSMC is one of the core partners in imec’s industrial affiliation program on advanced CMOS technologies. Imec’s unique research platform harnesses the collective expertise and knowledge of the entire value chain, bringing together foundries, IDMs, fabless and fab-lite companies, packaging and assembly companies, and equipment and material suppliers, to drive innovation and the development of new, competitive products.

Other strategic CMOS partners include Intel, Samsung, Globalfoundries, Micron, SK Hynix, Toshiba/Sandisk, Qualcomm, Huawei, Panasonic, Sony ... TSMC’s commitment to imec was extended in 2009 by the establishment of TSMC’s European R&D facility at the imec campus, benefiting from imec’s state-of-the-art semiconductor cleanroom facility.

Imec and its partners, in turn, benefit from TSMC’s broad-based technology roadmap and platform expertise, its customers, suppliers, and ecosystem partners. Other highlights in the collaboration between imec and TSMC are the appointment of imec as a TSMC value chain aggregator for Europe, enabling imec to offer TSMC technology on a multiproject wafer basis to European companies and academia through imec’s Europractice IC services, and imec to become a VCA of TSMC for the Indian market in 2013.