TMI - Taiwan Microsystems Inc.

TMI - Taiwan Microsystems Inc. was established in 1976 in Taichung, Taiwan (the third largest city in the country, located in the middle part of the island) as a subsidiary of AMI.

The purpose of TMI was to produce Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) for digital watches, of which AMI was the first in the world to produce large volumes. TMI was truly a multinational company: it was invested in by an American company, located in Taiwan and managed by a Korean with a Taiwanese workforce (as you can see, there are three national flags on D.I.'s desk (Bottom Right).

D.I. was dispatched to Taichung as the General Manager of TMI, and as the only expatriate from AMI. He assumed the daunting task of building a plant, hiring local managers who had never actually seen the LCD technology, training them for the strange LCD assembly operation, sending them to AMI for a few months for training, and then launching the operation with these managers and a handful of visiting engineers.

The people in the Main Picture are six local managers and starting members of TMI. The six-point star and the "15" in the middle of the employee badge (Center) signify April 15 of 66th year of the Republic of China (1977), which was the day TMI had its opening ceremony (and which also coincided with D.I. and Jane's wedding anniversary).

As KMI had done years before, TMI improved defect rate to less than 1/10 of AMI's LCD plant in Sunnyvale, California, and it achieved this rate in less than one year, which once again surprised the AMI management.