Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. Headquartered in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan, TSMC was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, who is credited with pioneering the semiconductor foundry business model. It is a public company, traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2330) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TSM). As of December 31, 2025, TSMC had 90,557 employees. In 2025, TSMC's estimated annual revenue was $122.42 billion, and its market capitalization was over $550 billion in April 2021. TSMC is the world's largest dedicated chip foundry, holding approximately 70% of the global market share in 2025.

TSMC specializes in the manufacture of integrated circuits, offering a comprehensive range of wafer fabrication processes including complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) logic, mixed-signal, radio frequency (RF), embedded memory, and bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) mixed-signal. They also provide mask services, integrated circuit packaging, and multi-wafer foundry services. TSMC serves a broad customer base, including major fabless semiconductor companies such as Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and AMD, for applications in high-performance computing, smartphones, IoT, automotive, and digital consumer electronics. The company is a pure-play foundry, meaning it exclusively manufactures chips designed by other companies and does not design or sell its own branded IC products.

TSMC's patent litigation posture, based on the provided data, shows them as a defendant in patent assertion entity (PAE) suits. They have one tracked case as a plaintiff and zero as a defendant in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) database. The sole tracked case, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited v. Advanced Integrated Circuit Process LLC, lists TSMC as the plaintiff in a PTAB action initiated on March 26, 2025. This indicates TSMC is challenging a patent asserted against them.

External context reveals that Advanced Integrated Circuit Process LLC (AICP) is a non-practicing entity (NPE) that has asserted semiconductor fabrication patents against TSMC and other companies like United Microelectronics. AICP received a portfolio of patents from Winbond Electronics (Nuvoton Technology Corporation Japan) in July 2024, and subsequently filed lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas. The PTAB case initiated by TSMC against AICP specifically targets a patent (8,587,076) that AICP has asserted.