BY JEFF DORSCH, Contributing Editor

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing kicked off its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum with thanks – not for another beautiful day in Silicon Valley, but for the collaborative work it does with its customers, suppliers, and other industry partners.

Rick Cassidy, the foundry’s senior vice president and president of TSMC North America, kicked off the all-day event in Santa Clara, Calif., saying he wanted to debunk the myth of the “lone creative genius” in the chip business. “It is a lot of geniuses working together,” he said. “Innovation happens collectively.”

While there has been much attention paid to the slowing growth in the smartphone market, mobile technology will continue to be a significant driver for the semiconductor industry, according to Cassidy. He reviewed the areas of mobile technology, the Internet of Things, and automotive electronics.

“IoT will require an incredible amount of interconnection technology,” Cassidy said.

Between IoT and automotive tech, there will be “a very significant amount of data that’s going to be needed to be stored and processed,” he added.

Cassidy emphasized TSMC’s relations with its many collaborators, large and small. “We’re a pure-play foundry,” he said. “We do not have any products.”

He added, “Nobody does yield better than TSMC.”

Cassidy noted that TSMC will spend more than $2.2 billion this year on research and development, compared with more than $1.9 billion last year. The foundry’s capital expenditure budget for 2015 is $10.5 billion to $11 billion, up from $9.5 billion in 2014, he added.

The opening session also heard from Jack Sun, TSMC’s vice president of R&D and chief technology officer, and Cliff Hou, vice president of the R&D design technology platform, as well as executives of Avago Technologies and Xilinx, two TSMC customers.

This article was originally published on SemiMD.com, part of the Solid State Technology network.