Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. clarified the company's SEC filing of receiving 1.8 million shares of Monolithic Power Systems (MPS), characterizing the transaction as an investment distribution outcome and not a corporate strategic investment decision. TSMC’s mainstream technology platform supports the industry’s richest technology mix, unmatched manufacturing excellence, and a robust portfolio of time-to-volume focused foundry services.

    TSMC provides the foundry industry's leading advanced process technologies and design collaterals. These processes include 45nm, 55nm, 65nm, 90nm and 0.13-micron. TSMC's advanced process technology provides the optimal combination of gate density, speed, and power, making it ideal for a broad range of applications such as computing, communications, and consumer electronics. On top of each node supports logic designs, mixed-signal/RF while embedded DRAM option is available for 45nm, 65nm and 90nm. Design collaterals include TSMC internal macros and the world's largest third-party IP library portfolios.

    "Monolithic Power Systems (MPS) was a company invested in by InveStar Semiconductor Development Fund and InveStar Semiconductor Development Fund II since early 1999. These two venture capital funds are invested by TSMC and managed by InveStar Capital who makes investment decisions independently. As is a common practice in the venture capital industry, ISDF and ISDF II have made a distribution of their publicly listed shares back to the fund investors, from which TSMC International received 1,850,623 shares of MPS on May 29, 2008. These shares are classified as "financial asset at fair value through profit or loss" in TSMC's consolidated balance sheet before their disposal," said Lora Ho, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, TSMC.

    In this era of omnipresent design differentiation, TSMC is proactively taking step to satisfy the semiconductor industry's needs. No longer is a logic focused process technology able to meet all market requirements. Rather, today's industry innovator requires special feature technologies such as mixed-signal/RF, embedded high density memory, non-volatile memory, high voltage devices and CMOS image sensor technologies. Feature technologies span TSMC's Advanced and Mainstream Logic Technology platforms.

    All feature technologies are supported down to the 0.18-micron process node. Embedded high density memory is available in Advanced Technology platforms down to the0.13-micorn node. Mixed signal technology is available down to the 90nm process node. Together, TSMC's feature technologies, integrated with their corresponding logic technologies provide a total platform solution meeting the industry's broadest range of IC design requirements.