According to the “Wall Street Journal” report, South Korea’s Samsung wafer foundry business ranks among the world’s top suppliers, and China’s SMIC, which developed 7-nanometer chips, has grown by leaps and bounds, all related to Taiwanese semiconductor engineer Liang Mengsong. “Wall Street Journal” with the title “Seventy-year-old Taiwanese chip magician boosts China’s semiconductor dream”, detailed Liang Mengsong’s various pasts in the semiconductor industry.
The report pointed out that people who knew Liang Mengsong felt that he was stubborn and easy to disagree with others, leading to frequent resignation. Even so, with semiconductor expertise, Liang Mengsong joined China’s SMIC in 2017, leading SMIC to become the leader of China’s entry into the first echelon of the global semiconductor industry. Recently, SMIC was found to have developed its own 7nm advanced chips and supplied chips to cryptocurrency companies. This also narrows the distance between SMIC and TSMC and Samsung, the leading manufacturers in the foundry industry.
Liang Mengsong, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, has published more than 350 technical papers. After joining TSMC in 1992, due to his good memory and orderly work, he has contributed a lot to the company’s growth. In 2003, TSMC used low-resistance copper to manufacture When the technology of smaller-sized chips was successful, the company listed Liang Mengsong’s name second in the press release, following his director Jiang Shangyi, showing TSMC’s affirmation of Liang Mengsong’s research and development capabilities.
Liang Mengsong
Liang Mengsong is also a workaholic and pays great attention to details. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that many old colleagues remember that when Liang Mengsong worked at TSMC, he would bring his young son into the office on weekends or holidays. Liang Mengsong firmly believes that downsizing is the king of high-performance chips. After TSMC spent too much energy on other projects, he disagreed with Liang Mengsong’s opinion. He left TSMC in 2009. In July 2011, Samsung announced the hiring of Liang Mengsong. He led the Samsung team and jumped from 28nm to 14nm in one breath, surpassing TSMC for half a generation, attracting heavyweight customers such as Apple and Qualcomm.
After that, TSMC launched the “Nightingale Project” to develop next-generation chips day and night, and actively regain the dominance of advanced chips. In the end, it took the lead in reaching the peak at the 10-nanometer node and established the leading position of advanced wafers so far.
In addition, TSMC sued Liang Mengsong for his job-hopping to Samsung, accusing him of leaking confidential technology and working at Samsung before the two-year competition restriction expired. The lawsuit continued until August 2015, when Taiwan’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of TSMC and banned Liang Mengsong from working for Samsung until the end of that year. Liang Mengsong left Samsung in 2015. In 2017, SMIC announced that it invited Liang Mengsong to serve as co-CEO and executive director.
SMIC developed a 7nm wafer.
The report pointed out that following Liang Mengsong joined SMIC, he did improve the product yield, and worked hard to shrink the chip size like TSMC and Samsung. However, when Liang Mengsong pushed for smaller chips, other executives and shareholders wanted to focus on more profitable mature process chips. In addition to the development strategy of Liang Mengsong, which was not in line with others, the personnel layout was even more leveraged by the former head of TSMC and later by SMIC. Please come to Jiang Shangyi, who is the vice chairman. Two years following the incident broke out, Liang Mengsong led the team to develop a 7-nanometer chip, but Jiang Shangyi has left and left China.
According to the “Wall Street Journal” report, Liang Mengsong said that he had led a team of more than 2,000 engineers from SMIC to complete the development of 7-nanometer technology.
