Semiconductor History | 台元科技園區, 竹北 — The Merger a Regulator Kept Open for Six Years

The chip in the photograph carries a stylised M and the part number MST9A885GL, in a 256-pin package, and it sat in the middle of a Toshiba television. 晨星半導體 (MStar) made it. The company was incorporated on 28 June 2002 and registered at 台元街26號, inside this office park in 竹北. Its founder, 梁公偉, came out of 台積電. MStar built the controllers inside LCD monitors, then inside televisions, and the trade press took to calling the two companies 大M and 小M, the big M and the small one. For a while the small one was ahead. In the Chinese market for television main-control chips MStar held about 65 percent against MediaTek's 15. On 22 June 2012 MediaTek announced it was buying it, swapping 0.794 of its own shares plus NT$1 in cash for each MStar share, in a deal then valued at about NT$115 billion. The two firms had fallen out publicly in the past over research staff moving from one to the other. Asked about that at the press conference, 蔡明介 said it was business. Then the transaction met a regulator in a third country. A combined company would have supplied about 80 percent of the chips Chinese television manufacturers had to buy, so in August 2013 China's Ministry of Commerce cleared the deal on one condition, set out in its notice 2013年第61號: the two had to go on operating separately, and competing with each other, for at least three years. MediaTek owned MStar and was not permitted to merge it. The three years expired in August 2016. MediaTek applied the following month to finish the job, and waited. Conditions came off on 9 February 2018, in notice 2018年第21號, and the ministry's reasoning was that the market had moved underneath the case. MStar's share of Chinese LCD television controllers had fallen to between 40 and 45 percent and MediaTek's to between 5 and 10, less than half the market between them. The same notice named who had arrived in the meantime. 海思, 晶晨 and 銳迪科 had entered the market, and 瑞昱 and 聯詠 had gained share. 聯詠 had walked out of 聯華電子 in the same breakup that produced MediaTek. On 1 January 2019 the merger took effect. Taiwan's company registry records 晨星半導體股份有限公司 as dissolved by merger later that month, and lists its final board as four people, every one of them a nominee of 聯發科技. 台元科技園區 sits about seven kilometres north of 新竹科學園區, on the far side of the 頭前溪, which is where a good deal of Taiwan's chip design work has always happened without a science park address. The pin here is the park rather than the doorway. The company registered to it no longer exists, and the chips it drew are still inside a great many televisions. Photo: Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (an MStar MST9A885GL controller on the mainboard of a Toshiba LCD television).