Semiconductor History | 工研院 中興院區 — The Government Lab That Built Taiwan a Fab

In October 1977 a demonstration fab opened inside a government research campus in 竹東, and Taiwan had its first integrated circuit production line.

It ran a 7.5 micrometre process and turned out about 300 three-inch wafers a week, which was small even then.

The number that mattered was the yield. By its sixth month of operation the line was running at roughly seventy per cent, better than the RCA plant that had transferred the technology, and better than anyone at 工研院 had promised.

Sources disagree on what RCA's own figure was, so take the seventy per cent and leave the comparison loose.

The transfer had been signed with RCA in 1976, and the first cohort sent to train in the United States was nineteen people, split across four states by discipline.

Design went to New Jersey, process to Ohio, test to California, equipment to Florida. Among the names on that list were 蔡明介, who would later run MediaTek, and 曹興誠 and 曾繁城, who would end up at the top of UMC and TSMC.

Nineteen engineers is a small number to hang an industry on, and the record supports it.

By 1978 the fab was producing integrated circuits for electronic watches, and Taiwan became one of the world's largest exporters of them within a few years — an unglamorous first product that paid for everything after it.

The origin story Taiwan tells about itself starts earlier, at a breakfast.

In February 1974 seven officials and engineers, among them 孫運璿, 費驊 and 潘文淵, met at a soy-milk shop called 小欣欣豆漿店 in Taipei and agreed to pursue integrated circuits; 潘文淵 then wrote the proposal that became the plan. The shop is long gone and published accounts disagree on the address, which is why this memory is pinned at the campus where the decision turned into a building.

工研院 is an active research institute and not open to visitors.

The main gate on 中興路四段 is what the first photograph shows, and it is as close as the public gets. Everything downstream of this address — UMC, TSMC, Vanguard, the design houses — was spun out of the work done behind it.

Photo: Briston, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (the main gate of ITRI's Chung Hsing Compound, Zhudong, 2006).

Photo: Young Juan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the ITRI campus).