Semiconductor History | 聯華電子, 新竹 — Four Shareholders With the Same Character in Their Names

聯華電子 was incorporated on 22 May 1980 with NT$500 million and a name assembled from its own cap table.

工研院 put in the technology; 交通銀行, 中華開發, 光華投資, 東元, 聲寶, 華泰 and 華新麗華 put in the money.

Several of those shareholders carry the character 華 in their names, and the new company took 聯華 — joined 華 — from that coincidence. Taiwan's first semiconductor manufacturer was named after its investors.

The first chairman was 方賢齊, who had been ITRI's second president and was one of the seven men at the 1974 breakfast.

What moved from the government lab to the company was not just a licence. ITRI transferred its four-inch wafer technology and the research team that had built it, including 曹興誠, who had trained at RCA in Ohio and would later run the company.

This is the spinout pattern that Taiwan then repeated for two decades: build the capability inside a state laboratory, then hand the people and the process to a private company and let it compete.

UMC listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in July 1985, the first semiconductor company in the country to do so.

It was also among the first tenants of 新竹科學園區, which had opened in December 1980, seven months after UMC was incorporated.

The company is still here and still making chips, now as a foundry running mature nodes rather than the leading edge — a position it settled into after TSMC took the frontier.

Its Hsinchu site sits on 力行二路, a few minutes from the park's other gates, and the photograph here shows the entrance.

There is nothing to tour. The park's public roads are ordinary streets between fabs, and the interesting thing to notice from them is how little a place that makes the world's chips looks like anything at all.

Photo: 創造未來，迎接康莊, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the UMC main entrance in Hsinchu Science Park).