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TSMC certainly "stole" the European chip industry. They had an IP transfer agreement with Philips.

Philips at that time also sold off its crown jewels like ASML and ASMI. This was the time when CEOs bragged about restructuring companies with inane statements like "the company should look like a board of asparagus, not like a board of spaghetti". Journalists thought it was brilliant at the time (enjoy your dinner!).

China and Taiwan benefited from this reckless outsourcing. I'm actually in favor of stopping any European or U.S. high tech exports and further outsourcing.

But it should be on an economic level, not on the silly warmongering level.



RCA also gave their crown jewels of semiconductor technology to what became MediaTek as RCA distracted itself with non-core acquisitions (transforming itself into "rugs, chickens, and automobiles," leading to their decline).

https://taiwaninsight.org/2024/05/10/a-short-history-of-semi...

Edit: I'm typing this on a Kindle that uses a MediaTek CPU (I don't know if UMC fabbed it).


Buying Ralink was also a hella good move. Founded in Cupertino California in 2001, made pretty solid wifi chipsets, sold to MediaTek 2011. https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediate...

The scope of mergers & acquisitions in semiconductors is mind boggling & terrifying. It feels like there's so much less diversity, that there's a frailty of entirely Too Big To Fail players left.




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