Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
3 years for a EE PhD is extremely impressive.
Sure, but to this day, it depends on the school. At some universities that's right out, at Stanford that's common (after a Master or two).
That wasn't the case for Chang but I feel that for some foreign students, it's due to them simply not recognizing that they could actually take their time and enjoy life and the out of this world campus and region. Some students feel pressure, of funding, of potential missed opportunity, of legal status, of acting on a bet that's WAY out of their home professional path, etc. Meanwhile some US students with no major funding problem often feel that there is all the time in the world, if only the university would let them.
For that matter, I bet Chang felt pressure to not be away from this career track at Texas Instrument for too long. He was doing this PhD as a requirement for a specific promotion.
Stop working so hard to make the word racist useless. We need that word. Thank you.
I'm not sure if that's true, but it's presumably what the other person was saying they observed. Though I think in casual conversation, the reality is that P(racism | <such a sentence>) is likely higher than "baseline", I'd prefer to give the benefit of the doubt on HN.
Also, much prefer a place where mentioning "race" doesn't immediate trigger strong reactions. "Race" being in quotations, because I think the original sentence has more to do with the culture of (certain parts of?) Asia rather than actual race.
A side analogy: I think that Asians are more likely to like Hello Kitty than non-Asians.
Ah sure he went on to work extremely hard and build a whole foundry business just because he didn’t recognize that he could actually take his time and enjoy life? I think you’re sort of right but also wrong. Telling an extremely ambitious person to “just enjoy life” is, I think, like telling an autistic person to “just be social”. It’s not as simple as that.
Chang had a specific reason to be quick anyway: his promotion at Texas Instrument would wait only so long.
As for other more common, younger foreign Stanford students - they can be autistic but they can also simply be young and not made aware of what the options really are. Believe it or not but university programs (credit system, years allowable for this or that, costs), school stipends, TA-ships, available scholarships, school schedule, even credit and banking or friendship expectations are completely different in their home country. They didn't think to find a mentor and nobody sought them out to point out what they really should be aware of. So yes, "simply not recognizing".
I presume financial incentives dragged out how long degrees like this take now. That, or everyone is dumber, which seems unlikely.
Maybe there's some ideal ratio between "current novelty levels" and "number of PhD candidates".
On the other side of the table, as a former sponsor of a season or two: it was the best marketing we (Crusoe) could have done. We had more high quality inbound from our audience than any other channel, by a long shot. They deeply understand their audience and target appropriately. Strongly recommend to anyone trying to reach a decision making audience (customer and investor).
1. I believe they require that you have an acquired specific landing page (e.g. crusoe.ai/acquired), which we saw directly as conversions through to our waitlist. The volume was lower than other channels, but the signal was much, much higher.
2. To @scarface_74's comment, "you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from" is mostly why I made the claim. In particular, when fundraising, basically everyone I talked to said, "I heard about you on Acquired, really interesting business model that I hadn't considered, let's talk more about it."
Sponsorship isn't cheap (I would go so far as to call it expensive), but relative to spending an equivalent amount on search or display ads/billboards on 101/etc., I think it was the right choice at the time.
My only analogy for this is what I call "cruise missile marketing" where you're investing a lot of time/money in building something that is very specifically targeted at high value buyers. It works really well for large, infrequent transactions (raising capital, selling GPU clusters, etc.) and less well for commodity SaaS or B2C products where volume >> everything.
If they had separate behind-the-scenes episodes with B-side detail and research discussion, they’d be the total package.
Not saying it isn’t well done! And it’s clearly landing with an educated audience. I know many fans.
That's fair but we can also recognize the pattern! We are now familiar with this one. Chang had noticed the need for fabs as a service to all. And he further noticed that it was at the intersection of others' needs: Taiwan looking for local industry, Philips looking for a local boost, established chips and design companies struggling to find the fab space they were ready to pay for, his ITRI mandate. There are no sure thing but we can see the good call and well done to put all the players together - that was plenty as grounds for a new business with good chances.
You can make a factory to make low end products. People copy you. Some employees bubble to the top, and can start making moderately decent products or quit to start on their own ideas. Eventually the low end stops being a good investment of money or people and it fizzles out in favor of luxury and specialty goods.
LG used to make the bottom shelf VCRs that you would find at Best Buy. The VCRs were branded Goldstar, the company Lucky Goldstar. When they went up market they rebranded to distance themselves from their bargain product lines. Now they have fridges that cost more than high end computers.
Now have Meile.
LG sill makes the best Televisions, though.
They may make best TV Panels, I would disagree they make best TV. That honour and title stills belongs to Sony. Although LG is getting close with image processing as seen in 2024 TVs.
I believe it is 張忠謀自傳全集（上下冊) (for both parts)
How much of this was because of Racism? How many people like that, with the right technical, operational knowledge, experience and drive are prevented from transforming their American company because they don’t fit the mold of what Americans consider to be “leaders”.
From what I heard from peers from that era, not significantly.
Taiwan's ITRI gave Morris Chang a blank check to implement his vision, which is something no ambitious person would turn down.
Why become yet another rich but nameless CEO (who remembers Bucy at TI) when you can become the next Jack Kilby or William Shockley.
China did the same thing for Liang Ming Song (former head of R&D at TSMC) at SMIC and India for Randhir Thakur (former head of foundry services at Intel and Applied Materials) at Tata Electronics.
--------
Stop being so combative to OP - he asked a fair question about the bamboo ceiling.
Looking at you Chollida1, next_xibalba, and Cumpiler69 (classy name /s)
Apparently the concept of “bamboo ceiling” (similar to glass ceiling) has its own Wikipedia entry:
Whether or not you view my comment as combative, I utterly reject your belief that you have the right to police my content or tone. This isn't Reddit.
[1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-engineering-h...
What specific claims of racism has he made?
Huh? How did you make that leap? As others have pointed out, Chang was a bigwig at TI.
Perhaps you’re incorrect?
1958:
- "When Chang arrives at Texas Instruments (TI), he’s immediately impressed. Almost everyone is young, less than 40, and everyone works very hard, 50 hours a week or more."
- "Some employees work so much that they bring cots into the office to sleep. And while there’s an obvious chain of command, there’s few trappings of status or hierarchy"
- "...executives and workers eat together in the cafeteria, and high-level managers and production-line workers converse freely"
- "...everyone at TI seems to be an expert on them (semi conductors)."
1972+:
- "His immediate boss, Fred Bucy, has no semiconductor background"
- "...the knowledge of the executive leadership is increasingly out of date (something they seem to be ignorant of)."
- "Chang tries to convince leadership to start buying manufacturing equipment from outside vendors, which is more advanced and can achieve higher yields than TI’s internally-designed equipment, but he’s unsuccessful."
- "He also fails to convince them to increase R&D spending, which Chang views as a short-sighted decision to prioritize short-term profits over long-term competitiveness."
In 1973 Taiwan founded the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to help develop its industrial and technological capabilities. Taiwan’s industrial policy playbook was largely based on what had worked in Japan and Korea, and ITRI was based on similar institutes that had been founded in those two countries.
As a frequent visitor to Taiwan I note that they've tried to do the same thing several times since then, in other technical fields, and have yet to replicate the success they had with semi conductors. They to be fair they're only 23.6 million people so to be technical world leader "only" in semiconductors is already a huge achievement.
Regarding the translation from Chinese to English, I think it is a case for community funding. What is the budget required for this?
This is the equivalent of Sheryl Sandberg being tasked by a government to found a multi-billion government funded competitor of Facebook.
At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.
Look at Hock Tan at Broadcom for example - he started out as a line level EE in the semiconductor space (Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub for semiconductors), but he is notorious for being extremely dollar driven (I've heard him unironically say "Show me the money" a couple times).
I think this is a problem, particularly for the major tech companies that produce tech as the end product. If you are purely a "business leader" then the continued growth and even existence of the company is in jeopardy. Isn't the part of the job you mentioned better done by the COO or CFO?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/em...