The Day Morris Chang Laughed Out Loud: Chenming Hu's New Book and the Talent Network Behind Taiwan's Chip Industry

October 10, 2026 was Taiwan's National Day, and the long weekend was a busy one. First I went to Hsinchu to moderate the Double Ten Forum held by two industry elders: Chintay Shih, former president of Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and Stan Shih, founder of Acer. Then I took part in the 2026 Taiwan-Japan Future Technology Forum, hosted by the Indo-Pacific Thinktank (IPST), a private Taiwanese think tank founded in October 2024 by Akio Yaita, former Taipei bureau chief of Japan's Sankei Shimbun. In between, I found time to read Chenming Hu's new book, Find a Way (拿出辦法來), published in October 2026 by Taiwan's Commonwealth Publishing. It turned out to be a very good read, with many fine passages and several points that struck a chord with me, and I would like to share some of them here.

Professor Hu is internationally renowned in semiconductors. The 3D fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) he developed in 1999 let semiconductors break through physical limits, making devices smaller and more energy efficient. It can fairly be called the biggest change in the semiconductor industry in more than 40 years.

Hu is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and he has been hailed as a "microelectronics visionary." In 2001, at the invitation of TSMC Chairman Morris Chang, he became TSMC's first chief technology officer and helped TSMC become the world's most technologically advanced semiconductor company. In recognition of his contributions to innovation, President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

One Meeting Shows How Tightly Taiwan's Semiconductor Talent Network Is Connected

Several passages in the book are especially vivid. One describes how, after Hu joined TSMC in 2001, Morris Chang introduced him to the management team, and the executives took turns saying how long they had known Hu, each claiming a longer acquaintance than the one before. Here is how he describes it:

"Morris Chang usually chaired the operating committee meeting every Wednesday, and all senior executives attended. At my first operating committee meeting, Chang introduced me to the fifteen executives present.

"When he finished, Rick Tsai (then president) spoke first, saying he had known me for ten years, because I had been helping TSMC improve chip yield and reliability.

"C.C. Wei followed: 'My doctoral adviser was Hu's college classmate [T.P. Ma], and I have been reading Chenming's research papers for 15 years.'

"Next was Mark Liu, who said he had known me for twenty years. I had given him his first job, as my teaching assistant at Berkeley.

"Everyone was surprised and burst out laughing. When the laughter died down, Shang-Yi Chiang chimed in: 'I have known him for more than thirty years. We were classmates at NTU.'

"Then came Kenneth Kin: 'I have known Chenming for 40 years. We were classmates in junior high school.' The last word went to the final speaker: 'I have known him for 50 years, counting from the day I was born.' It was Cheng-Ta Hu (胡正大, transliterated), then vice president of marketing and the author's younger brother.

"In the end, even Morris Chang roared with laughter. It was the only time I ever heard him laugh out loud."

The executives in that scene went on to the following posts: Rick Tsai is now vice chairman and CEO of MediaTek, a Taiwanese chip design company; C.C. Wei is TSMC's current chairman and CEO; Mark Liu served as TSMC chairman from 2018 to 2024; Shang-Yi Chiang later became TSMC's senior vice president of R&D; and Kenneth Kin joined TSMC in July 2001 as senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

It is a classic scene. Hu writes that this unrehearsed moment is exactly what he uses when explaining to foreign friends why Taiwan's semiconductor industry is so strong: Taiwan's tech talent circle is tightly knit. Executives at TSMC and many other companies are, if not classmates, then seniors and juniors from the same school, or teachers and their students. Taiwan is a densely populated island, and its top students are concentrated in a handful of elite universities.

Hu also says that when you meet someone at work, whether a colleague, a supplier or a competitor, it often takes only a few exchanges to discover that you have met before. He gives an extreme example: Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su, whose families both come from Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan, are relatives a generation apart, and today they lead two companies competing head-on in the AI processor market.

He also notes that on that day, Chang let everyone see a rare burst of laughter, which perhaps hints at how much pressure came with working under him. "The members of the management team were of similar age, but Chang was about twenty years older; in both age and style he was like a teacher or a parent. He usually made the final call on issues. He would listen to and absorb other people's views, but he seldom said whose ideas they were."

Before the Double Ten Forum on October 10, 2026, I chatted with Chintay Shih, who was Hu's classmate in electrical engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU). Their class was remarkably talented. Besides Shang-Yi Chiang, former TSMC senior vice president of R&D, it included Ching-Yuan Wu (吳慶源, transliterated) and T.P. Ma, C.C. Wei's advisers at National Chiao Tung University (now National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) in Taiwan and at Yale, as well as Hu Chao (趙瑚, transliterated) and Hsu Mao (毛敘, transliterated), founders of Elite Semiconductor Microelectronics Technology (ESMT).

Shih told me the classmates even have a group of their own and still meet online once a month, sometimes inviting a speaker. Most of them live in the US, and he tries to join every time.

He Turned Down Intel, Then Found His Own Path

Hu also recounts that he went to the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, the year after Intel was founded in 1968. Andy Grove, who would later become Intel's CEO, taught his semiconductor course.

Grove invited Hu to join Intel. Hu was not interested at the time and did not even know what kind of company Intel was. Grove did not give up: he invited Hu to visit the company and told him that, like Hu, he was a first-generation immigrant to the US. Hu did not really want the job and replied that he had promised his parents he would finish his PhD. Grove immediately offered to pay for him to work while studying for a PhD at Stanford, but in the end Hu still did not go.

Hu says that looking back, he does have some regrets about turning down Intel's legendary CEO and not joining Intel in its early days. He faults himself for not being smart enough to grasp how important the microprocessor revolution Intel was launching would be, and for not thinking to ask other professors about it. But at the time his only dream was to become a professor at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and three years later he made that dream come true.

The book has many other highlights. For example, while he was at TSMC, Morris Chang gave him two assignments, one of which was to improve the balance of TSMC's intellectual property income. It is an important passage for IP management at Taiwanese companies, but I will not go through everything here; I will leave it for readers to discover.

One passage, however, deserves special mention: Hu's thoughts on the development of Taiwan's electronics industry. He says that over some twenty years he repeatedly offered advice to different political parties on a question people keep coming back to: "Is Taiwan's economy too dependent on the electronics industry?"

How Should Taiwan Allocate Its R&D Funding? Hu's Long-Standing Advice

He recalls that as TSMC's CTO, he dealt with the government over its allocation of places under the national defense service program, a system at the time that let young men fulfill their military service by doing R&D work at companies. TSMC had received very few places, fewer than the computer brand companies and fewer even than the R&D centers that foreign tech companies had set up in Taiwan. So he met a colonel at the Ministry of National Defense to ask for more.

The colonel told him the government's aim was to support brand companies, not manufacturers. Hu explained that TSMC was in fact Taiwan's biggest brand company, because every chip TSMC made carried the TSMC logo. He also pointed out that the government had already given foreign companies' R&D centers considerable tax breaks and other support. "I said everything I could say, but the colonel kept a poker face throughout and just repeated that the government's policy was what it was."

He also says that too much of Taiwan's R&D funding flows to research institutes and too little to universities. The largest national research institutes (presumably Academia Sinica, Taiwan's academic research institution, and ITRI) receive ample funding directly from the Presidential Office and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. These institutes may have been set up for historical reasons, but today the engines of industrial competitiveness are Taiwan's companies and universities, and the government's allocation of R&D funding should change accordingly.

Hu also argues that the more fundamental problem is a misunderstanding of why university research should be funded. For the country and society, if R&D money does not flow to universities to train students into people who can work and innovate, industry will not have a steady supply of talent. The research institutes receive more government research funding than all universities combined, yet they cannot generate the same leverage. Worse, they compete with industry for the same limited pool of talent.

Morris Chang, who headed ITRI before founding TSMC, made a similar argument years ago. Now that TSMC has been around for nearly forty years, whether national R&D funding is allocated correctly and sensibly is indeed still worth debating.

Hu's book also devotes a long section to where research funding comes from. Much of it draws on his own experience in the US, but clearly a great deal of it can serve as a reference for Taiwan.

For example, he recalls that his first doctoral student, Cliff, told him that the renowned Caltech professor Carver Mead often invited many students to his spacious, mansion-like home. This made Hu curious: how did Mead have so much research funding to support so many students?

Mead, he says, worked closely with Intel, which gave him a good deal of funding for his students' research, and in turn he helped Intel achieve many R&D innovations. Hu later learned to do the same. Much of his research funding had originally come from the US Department of Defense, but after he was invited to become a consultant to National Semiconductor, he had his students research topics that companies cared about. That opened doors at more Silicon Valley companies, and with more research grants he attracted PhD students interested in semiconductors. He gradually became one of the better-funded professors in his department, and he often supervised more graduate students than other electrical engineering professors.

Research support from companies is an important source of funding for US universities and a key to helping companies break through many R&D bottlenecks. Looking at Taiwan through the lens of the US experience, Hu sees the two becoming more alike. Taiwanese companies are growing larger, many are posting strong growth and profits, and they are willing to support more advanced research at universities. Whether the national research institutes can keep playing their past role of driving industrial development does need to be reexamined.

Reading a Good Book Is Always Life's Greatest Pleasure

After finishing Hu's book, I have much more I could say, but I will keep those thoughts to myself. I also want to encourage readers of this column: reading always pays. Reading and learning are always the happiest things in life, a joy you can only experience for yourself.

In the age of AI, no one lacks things to read, and I do spend a lot of time talking with AI and learning from it. But a good book, with content of real quality, will always be hard to replace. That is my biggest takeaway from reading Chenming Hu's Find a Way.