Semiconductor History | 新竹科學園區 — Sixteen Rented Sheds and a Government's Bet

On 15 December 1980 Taiwan opened an industrial park on the edge of 新竹 whose main product, at first, was sixteen rented sheds.

They were called 標準廠房, standard factory buildings, and the point of them was that a returning engineer with a circuit design and no capital did not have to build a plant before he could start a company.

The site was chosen for what stood around it rather than what stood on it.

國立交通大學 and 國立清華大學 were minutes away, and 工研院's 中興院區 in 竹東, where Taiwan's first integrated-circuit line had been running since October 1977, was a short drive down the road.

聯華電子 had been incorporated seven months earlier and would build its fab here. 台積電 arrived in 1987, out of ITRI, with ninety-eight people.

Neither company existed in a form that could have built the park, and the park did not exist in a form that could have built them. The government did both.

Not all of the plan was industrial policy.

The park came with subsidised housing, a bilingual experimental school for the children of engineers returning from American companies, and a bureau on 新安路 whose job was to be a single window for permits, which are the frictions that actually decide whether a family moves back across the Pacific.

Whether that was decisive or merely helpful is arguable. What is not arguable is that the returnees came, and that most of Taiwan's semiconductor leadership passed through this park in the decade that followed.

Fifteen of the original sixteen sheds came down from 2001, as the land under them became far too valuable for single-storey rental units.

The sixteenth was kept, rebuilt as an archive of the park's own history, and reopened in March 2007 as the 科學園區探索館.

It is the odd thing about this place: a park designed to be rebuilt every few years preserved exactly one building, and chose the cheapest one it had.

The Hsinchu campus now holds several hundred companies and on the order of 170,000 workers, and the administration building in the photograph, its sign reading 新竹科學園區行政大樓, still sits among them on 新安路.

Photo: Peellden, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; T Gordon Cheng, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.