Customers

TSMC’s worldwide customers have diverse product specialties and excellent performance records in various segments of the semiconductor industry. Customers include fabless semiconductor companies, system companies and integrated device manufacturers, such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Broadcom Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Huawei Tech, Marvell Technology Group Ltd., MediaTek Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, NXP Semiconductors, OmniVision Technologies, Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., etc.

Customer Service

TSMC believes that providing superior customer service is critical to enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is very important to retaining existing customers, attracting new customers, and strengthening customer relationships. With a dedicated customer service team as the main contact window for coordination and facilitation, TSMC strives to provide world-class, high-quality, efficient and professional services in design support, mask making, wafer manufacturing, and backend to achieve optimum experience for our customers and, in return, to gain customer’s trust and sustain company profitability.

To facilitate customer interaction and information access on a real-time basis, TSMC-Online services offer a suite of web-based applications that provide a more active role in design, engineering, and logistics collaborations. Customers have 24-hour a day, seven-day-a-week access to critical information and are able to subscribe customized reports through TSMC-Online services. Design Collaboration focuses on content availability and accessibility, with close attention to complete, accurate, and current information at each level of the design life cycle. Engineering Collaboration includes online access to engineering lots, wafer yields, wafer acceptance test (WAT) analysis, and quality reliability data. Logistics Collaboration provides access to data on any given wafer lot’s status in order, fabrication, assembly and testing, and shipping.

Customer Satisfaction

To assess customer satisfaction and to ensure that of our customers’ needs are appropriately understood, TSMC conducts the Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey (ACSS) with most active customers, either by web or interview, through an independent consultancy.

Complementary with the survey, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are also conducted by the customer service team so that customers can give feedback to TSMC on a regular basis. Through both surveys and intensive interaction with customers by our customer facing teams, TSMC is able to maintain close touch with customers for better service and collaboration.

Customer feedback is routinely reviewed and considered by executives and then developed into appropriate improvement plans, all-in-all becoming an integral part of the customer satisfaction process with a complete closed loop. TSMC has maintained a focus on customer survey data as one of our key indicators of corporate performance, not just of past performance but also as a leading indicator of future performance. TSMC has acted on the belief that customer satisfaction leads to loyalty, and customer loyalty leads to higher levels of retention and expansion.

Customers that Accounted for at Least 10% of Annual Consolidated Net Revenue

Unit: NT$ thousands

Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) initiative

Innovation has long been both an exciting and challenging proposition. Competition among semiconductor companies is becoming more active and intense in the face of increasing customer consolidation, and the commoditization of technology at more mature, conventional levels. Companies must find ways to continue innovating in order to prosper further. Companies innovating openly from the “outside in” as well as from the “inside out” accelerate innovation through active collaborations with external partners. This active collaboration of TSMC with external partners is known as “Open Innovation”. TSMC has adopted this path to innovate via the Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) initiative. OIP is a key part of the TSMC Grand Alliance.

The TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) initiative is a comprehensive design technology infrastructure that encompasses all critical IC implementation areas to reduce design barriers and improve first-time silicon success. OIP promotes the speedy implementation of innovation amongst the semiconductor design community and its ecosystem partners with TSMC’s IP, design implementation and DFM capabilities, process technology and backend services.

A key element of OIP is a set of ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components initiated and supported by TSMC that more efficiently empowers innovation throughout the supply chain and, in turn, drives the creation and sharing of newly created revenue and profits. TSMC’s Active Accuracy Assurance (AAA) initiative is critical to OIP, providing the accuracy and quality required by the ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components.

TSMC’s Open Innovation model brings together the innovative thinking of customers and partners under the common goal of shortening design time, minimizing time-to-volume and speeding time-to-market and, ultimately, time-to-revenue. The model features:

• The foundry segment’s earliest and most comprehensive EDA certification program delivering timely design tool enhancement required by new process technologies; and
• The foundry segment’s largest, most comprehensive and robust silicon-proven intellectual properties (IPs) and library portfolio; and
• Comprehensive design ecosystem alliance programs covering market-leading EDA, library, IPs, and design service partners.

TSMC’s OIP Alliance consists of 27 electronic design automation (EDA) partners, 39 IP partners, and 25 design service partners. TSMC and its partners proactively work together, and engage much earlier and deeper than before in order to address mounting design challenges at advanced technology nodes. Through this early and intensive collaboration effort, TSMC OIP is able to deliver the needed design infrastructure with timely enhancement of EDA tools, early availability of critical IPs and quality design services when customers need them. This is critical to success in order for customers to take full advantage of the process technologies once they reach production-ready maturity.

In October 2014, TSMC hosted an OIP Ecosystem Forum at the San Jose Convention Center in California, with keynote addresses from TSMC executives as well as OIP ecosystem partners. The forum was well attended by both customers and ecosystem partners and demonstrated the value of collaboration through OIP to nurture innovations.

TSMC’s OIP Partner Management Portal facilitates communication with our ecosystem partners for efficient business productivity. This portal is designed with an intuitive interface and can be linked directly from TSMC-Online.