Morris Chang

"Brother Yu Youcheng invited me to write a preface for his new book, “I See Intel” (published by CommonWealth Publishing) [1]. He said, “About two thousand words will"

"People busy doing things rarely have time to think about the past, but in the quiet of the night, when I occasionally look back, what I miss most is not the period after thirty-three, when my career began to achieve some success, but rather the first half of my life."

"Life’s turning points can sometimes be so unpredictable! A short phone call, plus a young man’s momentary impulse, ended up binding me to semiconductors for a lifetime!"

"Today, many people call Taiwan’s semiconductor industry the integrated-circuit industry. They are not wrong: the overwhelming majority of semiconductor manufacturers’ products are indeed integrated circuits. However, when it comes to the development of technology, I too am an incurable optimist. I firmly believe semiconductors are endlessly profound; integrated circuits are only their embodiment today. One day—perhaps in a few years, perhaps in a few decades—another invention based on semiconductors will appear. So I like this broader term: the semiconductor industry."

"Of course, relying solely on myself was absolutely not enough, because the book often contained passages that I read again and again, thought about again and again, and still did not understand. At those times, I had no choice but to ask someone. Ask whom? At that time I worked in Ipswich. Ipswich is a very small town, about sixty or seventy miles from Boston, and driving back and forth took more than three hours. Living in Boston was very inconvenient for me, but my wife was still working in Boston, so we were not in a hurry to find a home in Ipswich. For the first two months, I lived in the only hotel in Ipswich. Staying at the same hotel was a colleague who was recognized within Sylvania as a semiconductor expert; he became my first semiconductor teacher. I remember the hotel room was not comfortable, but it did have a decent restaurant. My “teacher” loved to drink. Every evening from 6:30 p.m. until the restaurant closed at 10 p.m., he spent all his time on alcohol. While drinking, he would also order a dish, to give the meal some meaning. My habit was to sit with him at dinner every day. At that time I still could not really drink, so I ate my dinner while he drank his alcohol, but when I asked him about parts I could not understand, he patiently explained them to me. Although he drank a lot, I never saw him truly drunk, and he indeed was a good expert—he could answer most of my questions. Every night, after I finished my meal and asked my questions, I went back to my room to continue reading. But sometimes when I encountered new questions, I would still go back to the restaurant to find him; as long as it was before the restaurant closed, he was almost certainly drinking alone."

"So when I entered the semiconductor industry, although it had only a few years of history, it was already in a Warring States era. Of course, I only began to understand these industry dynamics a few months after I arrived at Sylvania; when I went in, I was merely a clueless apprentice."

"Then why do we call this industry the “semiconductor industry,” and not the “transistor industry”? In fact, in the 1950s the semiconductor industry was almost the same as the transistor industry, and indeed some people called it the transistor industry, but most practitioners still called it the semiconductor industry. Why? Because of technological optimism! Most of the industry believed that the transistor would not be the only invention based on semiconductors—there must be others. Sure enough, semiconductor lamps and semiconductor lasers followed one after another, and more importantly, the integrated circuit was invented in 1958. Today, integrated circuits already account for 85% of the semiconductor industry. The transistor, which dominated the scene forty years ago, accounts for only 5% of semiconductors."

"The director who had hired me had found another position and left the company. After he left, few people mentioned production-line automation. In fact, talking about semiconductor automation at that time was at least ten years too early, because the process changed frequently—as could be seen from the fact that I changed the soldering method within just a few weeks. With a process that changed so often, how could it be automated? I was no longer worried that the purpose for which I had originally been hired no longer existed, because over several months my confidence in my own semiconductor skills increased day by day, and I even felt that within the production engineering department, I knew more than the other engineers. My supervisor—the production engineering manager—valued me quite a bit, and I gradually drew the attention of supervisors in other departments as well."

"I dug out the heat transfer textbook I had studied at MIT and did some rough calculations, and found that my concern was correct. So over the next few days, I tried an indirect heating method: not letting the soldering tool directly contact the electrode, but only letting it contact the copper wire, using copper’s high thermal conductivity to melt part of the electrode and complete the soldering. My method was slower than the original, but the likelihood of disrupting the transistor’s internal chemistry should be lower than with the original method, so the final yield should be higher. After I myself became proficient in operating my soldering method, I began training the two most experienced operators. After one or two days, their soldering speed using the new method had reached 80–90% of the original method. We accumulated several hundred transistors soldered using the new method and compared the yield with another group of transistors soldered using the original method. Sure enough, the yield of the new method was noticeably higher than that of the original method. My supervisor came over to take a look, and the production manager also came to see it, and even sat down and asked me to teach him the new soldering method. A few days later, the entire production line switched to my method."

"At that time, among the professors in MIT’s mechanical engineering department there were many master-level figures. In applied mechanics there was Den Hartog; in fluid mechanics there was Shapiro; in thermodynamics there were Keenan and Kaye; in materials science there were Orowan and Chao. A few months ago, a vice chancellor from the University of California, Berkeley came to visit me. He was a few years younger than I and also came from mechanical engineering, though not from MIT. When he discovered that I studied mechanical engineering at MIT from 1950 to 1955, we could not help recalling the past. He said that at that time he greatly envied MIT’s faculty and academic standards, and he also agreed that the 1950s truly deserved to be called the golden era of MIT’s mechanical engineering department."

"Only true modern people know that they are products of tradition and yet disloyal subjects of tradition; they know well the deficiencies of tradition and think day and night of using marginal creation to make up for them, but in their hearts they also understand that today’s creation will soon be surpassed, and therefore they cannot help but constantly fall into fear and anxiety. Jung hoped that people could, through the appearances of various social events, decipher the modern age from psychological and spiritual levels."

"In late March 1943, we set out from Shanghai. At the time of departure we only knew the general route; as for how long the whole journey would take, what means of transportation we would use, and where we would stay along the way, we had only incomplete and uncertain information that my father had inquired about. The first leg of the trip was the most reliable: taking a train to Nanjing, then transferring to a train to Xuzhou. Xuzhou was in Japanese hands at that time, but it was already very close to the front line where the Chinese and Japanese forces were fighting. After passing Xuzhou, the goal was Luoyang. Luoyang was in Chinese hands, so from Xuzhou to Luoyang we had to cross the battle line."

"My time at Sylvania can be said to have been the beginning of my fervent learning of semiconductor technology. After spending the first few months focusing on Shockley’s Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, most of what I learned came from academic papers published at the time or from my daily R&D work. Fortunately, my new boss held a Harvard PhD and was quite proficient in transistor theory, which benefited me greatly. Starting in 1956, I began attending semiconductor academic conferences at least two or three times a year. In December 1956, I published my first semiconductor paper, and in 1957 I published two more papers. In hindsight, these papers were insignificant, but they helped quite a bit in raising my standing inside and outside the company."

"About half of the funding for my section came from the company’s own funds, and the other half came from U.S. military contracts. At that time, the military urgently needed transistors and signed R&D contracts with many companies. To compete for these contracts, I often had opportunities to go to the Army Signal unit in New Jersey to discuss matters with the semiconductor technology procurement personnel there. One of them later became my colleague at TI. As I recall, at that time military contracts involved little bureaucratic red tape; the main point of management was the results. If the results met the specified requirements, the funds were paid in full; if the results did not meet specifications, part of the funding was withheld until they met the requirements."

"At the end of 1955, when I transferred to become section chief of the R&D department, silicon transistors had been on the market for more than a year, and TI almost monopolized the market. Even so, the cost of germanium was still lower than silicon, so most of the transistor market was still held by germanium. My responsibility was to develop germanium transistors of various frequencies and power levels."

"The new general manager immediately summoned “important personnel” one by one. I had never met him before, but I was also on the list of those summoned. Since joining Sylvania I had never been to the general manager’s office, yet now I had the chance to enter. It was an extremely spacious, luxuriously decorated office, far more lavish than the TI general manager’s office that I would later often enter, and it could even compare with the general manager’s offices of major companies in Taiwan today. The new general manager was very amiable and seemed sincere as well. While looking at a list on the desk, he said only a few short sentences: “I don’t know you, but as I understand it, your performance is good, so you are not among those to be laid off. However, the company needs to lay off about half the staff. Among the four engineers in your section, so-and-so and so-and-so are to be laid off; please inform them. Of course, the company will pay severance according to seniority. Your section will also be dissolved, and the remaining personnel will be merged into another section. Your salary and grade will not change, but from now on please contribute to the company as an individual engineer.” Even though he was amiable and sincere, every word of those sentences was unpleasant to hear. Our section—including me—was five young people; after two years of hard work, what we ended up with was two people being laid off. As for me? The new general manager seemed to think that not laying me off was already a great favor. But although I had not gone to other companies to look for work, I firmly believed that finding a job would not be a problem. I immediately protested on behalf of the two who were being laid off, but it was too late; he had already decided. The two who were laid off were both in their first jobs. Telling them this result was the hardest work of my life; both conversations ended in tears. In the end, the two of them said the same thing: “It seems enthusiasm and hard work still aren’t enough.” Youthful innocence disappeared within a single day, and that lost innocence could never be found again."

"Under these circumstances, my parents decided to send me overseas. My third uncle, Mr. Zhang Sihou, was then a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and he chose for me to apply to Harvard University. Why choose Harvard? First, Harvard is a world-famous institution; second, Harvard is in Boston, and my third uncle could look after me nearby. But Boston also had another world-famous school, one that specialized in science and engineering: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why, after my father had clearly told my third uncle that I was going to study science and engineering, did my third uncle still not choose MIT for me? About this, I later asked my third uncle. He smiled and said, “The you I knew was the you at Nankai in Chongqing, when you loved the humanities. Later I heard you wanted to study business. It wasn’t until you got to Hong Kong that I heard you wanted to study science and engineering. I thought you should have time to gradually establish your own interests. Rather than rush you into the very specialized MIT, it would be better to let you have a buffer period at Harvard. Besides, Harvard’s science and engineering are also top-notch—it’s just not as specialized as MIT.”"

"And what a vigorous company Texas Instruments was! Employees seemed to walk a bit faster than at Sylvania, and their backs seemed a bit straighter too. “Tired” was practically an adjective you never heard. At that time, the standard workweek in the United States was forty hours, but TI’s working hours were at least fifty; it was common for someone to bring a canvas cot to work in the morning, planning to sleep in the office at night. Working on Saturday mornings was an unwritten rule, and except for the most junior employees, no one received overtime pay for extended hours. I also discovered that within the company, “failure” was never accepted; “setbacks” could be understood, even sympathized with. But the person who suffered a setback had to pull themselves together and start again; if there was another setback, start again—until success. I also found that this was a very talkative company, where no one was afraid to voice opinions, even if some were very naive. In my first few months on the job, several times the production line’s yield suddenly dropped or failed to rise as expected; not only engineers and technicians, but even line operators would offer suggestions—and do so enthusiastically. Their suggestions were not necessarily adopted, but even after repeatedly hitting a wall, they would still continue to express their views."

"From early on he accepted the pre-Qin philosophers, Records of the Grand Historian, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, the Tongcheng school, and Chinese vernacular literature since the twentieth century; he even almost wanted to become a Chinese writer, but elders stopped him on the grounds that it would be hard to make a living."

"Just as the literary giant Hemingway described Paris as “a moveable feast,” I describe my year at Harvard the same way. After that, I went through various stages—MIT, employment, entering Stanford for a Ph.D., and working at Texas Instruments—but no matter where I went or what I did, I carried this “feast” with me and continually enjoyed the knowledge, interests, and insights that this “feast” gave me. Even decades later, when I returned to Taiwan, although changes in time and place made it feel as if I were in another world, this “feast” still did not lose its freshness. It was as though I were still immersed in a rich, ever-changing, refined, and captivating atmosphere."

"As if there were some force arranging things in the dark, Mr. Morris Chang’s third uncle, with foresight, first chose a year at Harvard for him, rather than immediately entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which most directly matched his specialty. In his year at Harvard, he immersed himself almost in all directions in Western civilization: from Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Austen, and Shaw, to Churchill’s World War II memoirs and the speeches of successive U.S. presidents; at the same time he subscribed to major American newspapers and periodicals, listened to music, watched theater, visited museums, attended ball games and dances, and made American friends."

"My mother decided to let me attend Nankai’s summer class: on the one hand I could review my schoolwork, and on the other hand there was also the chance of doing well and being recommended. Nankai’s rule was that all students had to live on campus. This was based on practical considerations: although Shapingba was only twenty or thirty kilometers from Chongqing, transportation was inconvenient at the time, and commuting was impossible for the vast majority of students. But setting practical considerations aside, requiring students to live on campus was actually a very good educational policy. In my experience, the periods when I learned the fastest, felt the happiest, and made the most good friends were all periods when I lived in the school dormitory."

"Over the past several decades of life, I have already traveled a million miles, but no matter how comfortable or even luxurious travel in recent years has been, the journey I miss the most, the one that has the greatest meaning for me, and the one that left the deepest impression in my mind, is still the trek from Shanghai to Chongqing when I was eleven."

"The freedom of the American people was conditional—it required obeying the law, and the law was quite clear, with little ambiguity, and enforcement was quite strict. For someone like me, a survivor of war who had come through a chaotic era, the rule of law in the United States in 1949 seemed like another world. Of course, there was often crime news in the newspapers, but in the lives of most of the people in the city of Cambridge where I lived, it seemed that no shadow of crime intruded. “No need to bolt the door at night, and nothing left lying on the road would be picked up” truly was a depiction of life at that time."

"He likes to quote Hemingway’s words, describing what he gained at Harvard as “a moveable feast,” and believes that this feast nourished his entire life, including the technological work he engaged in that seemed to have little to do with the humanities, up to today."

"Then let him continue to be there, unsmiling and unsparing—this is the privilege of modern innovators. If everything can be explained by the past, how could it still be called modern? If everything can be found supported in old books, how could it still be called innovation"

"With such broad coverage and such hunger, it would of course affect the time and energy for professional study, but viewed over the full course of life, it can truly be said to be “sharpening the knife does not delay cutting firewood”—he fundamentally remolded himself once."

"Fortunately, after being remolded in life, Mr. Morris Chang possessed the confidence and strength to avoid these graves large and small. He failed the doctoral qualifying examinations twice in 1954 and 1955, suffering a great blow, but he spent only one week to get past the psychological trap. He avoided the path that Chinese overseas students would inevitably take—transferring schools to pursue a doctorate again, and then spending a lifetime engaged in teaching and research—and instead raised his head and went to find a job himself. He has a passage in his autobiography that is said with great flavor."

"Jung said that not everyone living in modern times can be called a “modern person.” True modern people are very few; they stand neither in yesterday nor in tomorrow, but on the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow. A full awareness of this transitional state makes them simultaneously experience loneliness, because the broad masses are always unconsciously shrouded in the historical fog, and some even put on a pseudo-modern mask over a regressive essence. Only true modern people know that they are products of tradition and yet disloyal subjects of tradition; they know well the deficiencies of tradition and think day and night of using marginal creation to make up for them, but in their hearts they also understand that today’s creation will soon be surpassed, and therefore they cannot help but constantly fall into fear and anxiety. Jung hoped that people could, through the appearances of various social events, decipher the modern age from psychological and spiritual levels."

"Self-studying semiconductors, gradually standing out At the same time, I began to teach myself semiconductors. My textbook was Shockley’s (one of the inventors of the transistor and a Nobel Prize winner) classic work, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. For a beginner, this is quite a difficult textbook. The feeling of first reading Homer’s epic poems when I had just arrived in the United States six years earlier appeared once again."

"At nineteen I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I learned my livelihood skills at the highest institution"

"At eighteen I entered Harvard University in the United States. Among more than a thousand classmates with blue eyes, I was the only Chinese. For a whole year I had only American friends, used only English, and absorbed Western culture like a sponge. Even now, several decades later, that year at Harvard remains the most unforgettable and most exciting year of my life."

"After my father arrived in Hong Kong, he very firmly believed that I must study science and engineering so that after graduation I could make a living. Where could I go to study science and engineering? At that time Hong Kong had only one university, the University of Hong Kong; not only were science and engineering not strong there, but the entire school was not very highly regarded. Forced into it, my father believed I had only one path: to go to the United States to attend university. He still had the ability to cover my first year’s tuition, fees, and living expenses. As for after one year, it would depend on how things went for him in Hong Kong; and after I had become more accustomed to the American environment, I should be able to apply for scholarships, or work part-time while studying. My mother told me frankly that even my first year’s expenses were already a heavy burden for my father: “Fortunately you are an only son; otherwise we would not have the ability to send you abroad.”"

"When the crowd praises his technological achievements, Morris Chang sees only responsibility; When the world envies his century-spanning glory, Morris Chang thinks only of dedication."