The story of the battle for semiconductors was the battle between Liang Mong Song of SMIC /Samsung vs Morris Chang of TSMC and the future of AI.
Dwarkesh Patel talked with Dylan Patel and Jon Y of Asianometry.
Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis, the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware: https://www.semianalysis.com/
Jon Y runs @Asianometry, the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business history.
Liang Mong Song vs Morris Chang of TSMC
Liang Mong Song was one of TSMC’s geniuses.
He was known as one of the Six Knights of TSMC R&D. He was responsible for the memory-related work of ultra-micro semiconductors.
After returning to Taiwan in 1992, Liang served as an engineer and senior R&D director of TSMC. He is credited with nearly 500 TSMC patents and was responsible for or participated in the most advanced development of each generation of TSMC’s manufacturing processes.
He lost a power struggle in TSMC and then left for Samsung.
Samsung Electronics offered Liang three years’ salary equivalent to his ten years of service at TSMC. Liang agreed to join Samsung and took away more than 20 employees, including those from his old TSMC engineering department.
He pushed Samsung to the leading edge of semiconductors to overtake TSMC.
Samsung was at the R&D bottleneck of switching from the 28 nm process to the 20-nanometer process. Liang advocated that Samsung abandon the 20 nm process and directly upgrade from the 28 nm process to the 14 nm process.In the end, Samsung’s 14 nm process was mass-produced about half a year earlier than TSMC.
Samsung won the first batch of orders for the Apple A9 and Qualcomm’s order which were originally exclusive to TSMC in the Apple processor-related market. This caused TSMC’s stock price to fall for a time, losing 80% of Apple’s orders and losing US$1 billion.
TSMC Got the lead back from Samsung when Morris Chang CEO of TSMC went to 7-24 research.
The story from Chinai Substack by Jeffrey Ding.
TSMC assembled an unprecedented R&D team in the industry: the Nightingale Army – a team that worked at night. TSMC learned from Foxconn assembly line and built a three-shift R&D department to ensure 24-hour uninterrupted R&D. Nightingale’s salary was much higher than assembly workers or regular R&D personnel – 30% increase in base salary and 50% in dividend. Attracted by the rewards, before long the Nightingale quickly gathered more than 400 people. Because staying up late harms the liver, the nightingale model is also called “liver buster.” A few sayings started to spread in Taiwan, “100,000 young people, 100,000 livers”, “the tougher the liver, the more money.” In 2014, the total annual working hours of Taiwanese laborers was 2135 hours, far exceeding the rest of the world. When Intel was defeated by TSMC’s technology in 2017, some Intel employees went to TSMC to figure out why, and the answer was: you snooze you lose; you’ve been sleeping too much for too long.
The “Nightingale program” started in the mid-2010s to jumpstart its R&D. TSMC had a three-shift, 24-hour non-stop R&D operation.
TSMC completed FinFet implementation and beat Samsung. They sued Samsung over Liang Mong Song and Song went to SMIC.
Song becomes CEO of SMIC and again recruits many of the top people from Samsung and TSMC.
Liang Mong Song is responsible for pushing China to 7nm (close to the leading edge).
He is a genius with 500 patents.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I love how Chinese/Koreans can simultaneously be ‘genius with 500 patents” and have wives tale idioms about how lack of sleep specifically offends the liver. Obviously, lack of sleep will negatively affect your health, but to think the liver is taking the brunt of that indicates the culture remains deeply rooted in superstition.
Not that it is worse than westerners talking about quarks, strings and climate change while mocking Christianity.