One final piece of the competitive puzzle for TSMC is the economic inflection point that the chip business is approaching as transistor shrinkage increasingly encounters the limitations of physics.
In 1959 Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments each invented the integrated circuit, etching a transistor onto a two- dimensional chip of silicon.
Building a transistor that sticks out of its parental chip lets many of its component atoms be deployed more usefully particularly those that constitute the channel and the gate.