Morris Chang

"Just as I was working day and night, fighting desperately on the NPN diffused production line, a world-shaking event was quietly happening before my eyes. Let me explain why something world-shaking happened quietly. It’s simple: “world-shaking” was the later impact; “quietly happening” was the fact at the time. Not long after I joined TI, I got to know a colleague who joined at almost the same time as I did. He had a very striking appearance: extraordinarily tall (over two meters), thin, and most conspicuous of all, an enormous head. At the time he was in his thirties, but looked rather older. Before joining TI, he had worked in Ohio. We were both new TI employees, both from the East, and about the same age, so we quickly became acquainted. Often at five or six in the afternoon, when the day’s work came to a pause, we would have a cup of coffee and chat. He told me he worked in R&D and was thinking of putting several transistors and diodes, plus resistors, together into a circuit on the same silicon chip. He also said that TI’s president, Haggerty, was very interested in his research and believed this was the future direction of semiconductor development. At that time, I was gradually gaining a bit of a reputation in the company for understanding transistors, so sometimes he would also ask my opinion. Honestly, at that time it was difficult enough for me just to make one transistor; putting several transistors plus other electronic components onto the same silicon chip and having them function at the same time was simply inconceivable. But I did my utmost to answer the technical questions he asked me. After a while, he told me he had already made a circuit with a rough scale and form. I was happy for him, but I couldn’t help thinking that for this thing to have practical applications, it was still a long way off."

"If I ask myself honestly, why was it that I could achieve some results as soon as I “first tried to make my name” at TI? In my first half year at TI, what I knew and what I could do was not much different from the latter part of my time at Sylvania; at Sylvania, my colleagues and I under Cory also designed and developed quite a few decent transistors, but in the end those achievements all faded into obscurity. Why? At Sylvania, I did not have a big customer anxiously waiting for delivery—if I succeeded in production, he would immediately relax; I did not have a supervisor who had already negotiated a reasonable price with the customer—if I broke through on yield, he could make a lot of money; I did not have a production department that cooperated closely like Luce’s, full of confidence, gambling together and winning together; I did not have a group of enthusiastic operators with team spirit, pulling together through hardship and cheering and dancing with excitement in success; and I especially did not have senior management who could understand the problem and appreciate the achievement. These conditions that I did not have at Sylvania but did have at TI were all because TI and Sylvania were two companies different in nature—different environment, different people. TI gave me opportunities that Sylvania never gave me."

"The development of integrated circuits was faster than I had imagined when I chatted with Kilby. After the inspiration from the inventions of Kilby and Noyce, the biggest obstacle to the development of integrated circuits was manufacturing process capability. Under fierce competition among companies, advances in process capability progressed by leaps and bounds. Products I considered “unthinkable” in 1958 had become quite possible by 1962. In 1963, TI established an integrated circuit business unit and began small-scale production. By the end of 1966, when I took over as general manager of the integrated circuit business unit, business had already reached about 1.5 million U.S. dollars per month. In the early 1970s, the MOS structure was widely adopted, and integrated circuits grew even faster. By 1995, the global integrated circuit market reached 130 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 85% of the entire semiconductor market."

"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"

"What I call an “R&D–business community of shared fate” of course does not apply to basic or cutting-edge research. That kind of research indeed requires considerable freedom and should not be interfered with by short-sighted heads of business units. However, even in the largest enterprises, basic or cutting-edge research constitutes only a small part of R&D work. The vast majority of R&D should still be closely related to the business and should also be tightly integrated with business units."

"In recent years, the number of people from Taiwan going to Silicon Valley to study, to sightsee, or to settle has increased greatly. Most people believe the living environment in Silicon Valley is much better than in Taiwan. But if Silicon Valley today is a paradise, then Silicon Valley more than twenty years ago was simply like heaven. From San Francisco to San Jose, a north–south stretch of sixty miles and about ten miles east–west, it is now a bustling metropolitan area, with every kind of urban problem: dense population, traffic congestion, increasing pollution, soaring housing prices, and worrying public safety. When I was studying at Stanford, none of these problems had yet appeared; what there was instead were beautiful scenery, a pleasant climate, and a leisurely atmosphere."

"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."

"People often ask me whether young people should finish all their degrees before going to work, or whether they should first earn a bachelor’s and master’s, work for a few years, and then return to school for a PhD or an MBA. My answer is: if one aspires to be a professor or a researcher, one should finish the degrees first and then go to work; if one aspires to the corporate world, one should work for a few years first and then return to school."

"Having “outsmarted myself” like that—if it were me now, I might just laugh it off, accept it, and without another word still go to Ford. But the young, hot-blooded me became furious from embarrassment. And in that fury, I began to “think in reverse.” I was confident about the work at Ford, but was I unwilling to take a risk and go to Sylvania to do something I wasn’t confident about? I thought I got along very well with the supervisor at Ford, but judging only from the personnel manager’s coldness, how unreliable was that fleeting impression! I thought Ford was large and my career would be secure, but semiconductor development might be fast and perhaps would give me more opportunities to grow. Turning it over again and again for a few days while the humiliation was still fresh, I actually arrived at a conclusion that would have been impossible a few days earlier: go to Sylvania!"

"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."

"At the same time, silicon transistors had already appeared one year before I started working. The birth of the silicon transistor is an interesting story in the semiconductor world, and it is worth mentioning here. When the transistor was invented in 1948, scientists already knew that silicon was a better transistor material than germanium. Unfortunately, silicon needed to be refined and processed at high temperatures, and at that time it was not possible to produce silicon of sufficient purity, so germanium was used first. Big companies all had silicon research programs, but they all believed there were still many obstacles, and that it would take several years before silicon could be used to make transistors."

"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."

"When I joined Sylvania in 1955, there were already twenty or thirty companies engaged in the semiconductor industry, which could roughly be grouped into two categories. The first category was large companies already in the electronics industry or closely related to it. At that time the largest electronics businesses were radios and televisions, but the computer industry was about to emerge. Companies in this category included GE, RCA (Radio Corporation of America), IBM, Motorola, Sylvania, Sperry, and so on."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"The master-level professors’ attitude toward handling questions also left a deep impression on me. American students like to ask questions; the level of questions varies, some are very childish, but some are also quite profound."

"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 that time I was “in the mountains without knowing the mountains,” and did not know that I was living in a golden age, but I did have a deep impression of the master-level professors."

"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.”"

"Before I turned eighteen, I had already fled disaster three times, lived in six cities (Ningbo, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Chongqing, Shanghai), and changed schools ten times. I had experienced gunfire (Hong Kong) and bombings (Guangzhou, Chongqing), and crossed battle lines (from Shanghai to Chongqing). I had a carefree childhood (Hong Kong), and also tasted the impassioned life of a middle school student during the War of Resistance (Chongqing); still more, I tasted the sorrow of leaving home and country, not knowing when I would return (from Hong Kong to the United States)."

"Just then, one night I reopened the Hemingway collected works [2] that I loved, and turned to his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The protagonist is a writer who develops gangrene at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, cannot move, and waits to die while gazing at the snow-covered peak. The following are his hazy thoughts before death: Now he could never write the stories, the ones he had saved up to write when he could write them better. Maybe at least he had not written them badly. Maybe he would never be able to write them any better, and that was why he had been putting off writing them. In any case, everything was unknown now."

"When the general manager values technology, it creates a top-down effect. Many managers who had become distant from technology at work had to hurry to catch up. About a year after I joined the company, I was promoted to director of germanium transistor development (the title was the same as at Sylvania, but the scope of work was much larger), and I also got a new supervisor. The new supervisor believed that the technical knowledge of the group of managers under him (six or seven people including me) urgently needed improvement, and asked me to run a remedial class."

"Looking back many years later, those seven months in Hong Kong at the age of eighteen were an important dividing line in my life. My old world collapsed as the mainland changed hands, and a new world was waiting to be built. Before Hong Kong, like millions of young people my age, I focused on preparing to study and work in China; after Hong Kong, I took the first step toward living abroad for the long term. Before Hong Kong, I wanted to go into business; after Hong Kong, I began a lifelong career in technology. Before Hong Kong, my parents were my whole world, and I relied on them for everything; after Hong Kong, I discovered that my parents could no longer help me, and I could only rely on myself."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Is it “easy to know but hard to do,” or “hard to know but easy to do”? I think that as a man of action, Mr. Zhang Zhongmou actually leans toward “hard to know but easy to do,”"

"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."

"In my senior year, I once had the idea of transferring to the physics department or the electrical engineering department. Among all the science and engineering courses I had taken, I liked physics and mathematics more. Of course these two sciences are required in the physics department, and the electrical engineering department also takes more of them than mechanical engineering. But I discovered that if I changed majors, I would have to delay graduation by at least one year, perhaps even two. Given the premise of graduating as soon as possible, I gave up that idea."

"Pursuing practical results in modern high-tech enterprises is, of course, related to innovation; therefore, what necessarily follows close behind the pragmatic philosophy is the philosophy of innovation. Without innovation, one is eliminated immediately—there can be no results to speak of. In this autobiography there is a passage describing the Sylvania company, where Mr. Zhang Zhongmou once served with great enthusiasm. Because the leadership of the semiconductor division stagnated and grew complacent, it ultimately declined. The scene in which Mr. Zhang went to inspect the instruments and equipment to be sold is quite affecting."

"At twenty-four I entered the semiconductor industry; at that time the semiconductor industry itself was only three years old."