Hon Hai's Facebook official website yesterday announced the "Hon Hai People's One Day" series, interviewing Jiang Shangyi, the group's most senior newcomer and chief semiconductor strategyman. Talking about why he joined Hon Hai Group, Jiang Shangyi revealed for the first time, I have a dream, that is, the system foundry model, and I came to Hon Hai for this reason, and I am optimistic that Hon Hai Group has three major advantages in the semiconductor field.
On November 22, 2022, Hon Hai Group announced that it has recruited Jiang Shangyi, co-operating officer of the former TSMC and known in the industry as the group's semiconductor strategy officer. Because Jiang Shangyi has served in the semiconductor industry for decades, which is very different from the electronic foundry field to which Hon Hai belongs, the news of Jiang Shangyi's appointment to Hon Hai has shocked the global semiconductor and electronic foundry industry, and the industry has also been hotly discussing his move to a new field.
Jiang Shangyi was probably more familiar with the operation of Hon Hai Group and avoided the topic of moving to Hon Hai. A year after Jiang Shangyi's arrival, Hon Hai's Facebook website posted an interview with Jiang Shangyi, revealing that on October 18 last year, he sat in the audience at the Hon Hai Tech Day event as a guest, which impressed him so much that he decided to join Hon Hai a month later.
Jiang Shangyi pointed out that Hon Hai has a very special system, that is, senior executives will take turns to sit next to the chairman, and this system, I think, is to cultivate the company's culture, so that everyone can understand his (the chairman's) ideas and cooperate with each other better, this system is something I have never seen anywhere else before.
He said that the system foundry model I talked about on (Hon Hai) Technology Day, the model I thought in my heart was to start with semiconductors, and the entire technology content was in Hon Hai, and I thought that Hon Hai was the most suitable to promote, which was the only reason why I joined Hon Hai.
He pointed out that although Hon Hai was not a semiconductor company before, and there were relatively few semiconductors involved, Hon Hai was probably the most complete company in the entire semiconductor chain.
Jiang Shangyi believes that he can't think of a second company in the world with such a complete industrial chain, if we look at this advantage, our entry point is probably divided into several aspects, on the one hand, the timing is very good, the Moore's law of semiconductors is almost to the end, so such a good time to cut in.
He said that the second is that Hon Hai starts from a relatively mature special process, and the manpower, material resources and equipment required are not so high, and the profit is not bad. The third is to start from the existing advantages, the smoothness of the entire industrial chain, and take this advantage to cut in, which is a possible direction I want to go in Hon Hai Semiconductor.
Recall that back to Guotai Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., I asked the boss to set up an advanced packaging R&D department with 400 people
Jiang Shangyi, the current chief strategy officer of Hon Hai Semiconductor, was once the most popular TSMC person, and has the title of "Jiang Dad" in the semiconductor industry. Jiang Shangyi mentioned in the program last night (9 3) that the advanced packaging department established in TSMC is the cowos little golden rooster that is now allowing NVIDIA to grab production capacity.
The 77-year-old Jiang Shangyi was interviewed by the host of Times News and talked about various stories in TSMC. Jiang Shangyi said that one of TSMC's advantages is the integration of the company's technology, and each factory has the same system and the same standards, which is an important key to TSMC's success.
Jiang Shangyi recalled that Zhang Zhongmou, the founder, was very strict in governing the company, and also managed senior executives and employees with a rigorous attitude. He laughed at himself that he was the one who was scolded, but after the founder Zhang was scolded, he would teach people, but some supervisors would just scold and not teach, which was more unfair. 」
Why is TSMC successful?Jiang Shangyi said that at the beginning of TSMC's founding, there were a group of semiconductor pioneers, all of whom were outstanding engineers who grew up in Taiwan, and most of the Taiwanese were very smart and diligent, and they also had a sense of innovation, hard work, dedication, and considerable discipline, which were the advantages of the Taiwanese people, and the semiconductor industry was just suitable for people with these advantages to play. Coupled with various opportunities, TSMC may be the only high-tech industry in Taiwan that has a leading position in the world.
Jiang Shangyi recalled that when he first joined TSMC, the technology was about 2 years behind the industry's most advanced technology5 generations, when we were doing 025 microns, experienced the hard work of catching up all the way. A year or two before he retired, about 2011 or 2012, at that time, Zhang Zhongmou mentioned one of TSMC's major advantages on different occasions, that is, the decision was made very quickly, for example, a staff member once ran to Zhang's office and said Can you take up 2 minutes of your time, as soon as the staff member opened his mouth, he asked for 2 million euros, and Zhang Zhongmou agreed without saying a word. At that time, a large semiconductor company in the United States took six months to make a decision, and then made the decision not to spend this money.
Jiang Shangyi used to be TSMC's most popular candidate. In 2005, Zhang Zhongmou retired as CEO and full-time chairman, and Jiang Shangyi also applied for retirement for the first time in 2006. Later, in 2009, Zhang Zhongmou returned to the pot as CEO, and Jiang Shangyi was invited to return to TSMC as the chief operating officer. He told me to go back, and I went back. After a few months, Jiang Shangyi proposed to his boss to set up a packaging unit in the R&D department.
At that time, Zhang Zhongmou replied, You joined our company too late, TSMC discussed it very carefully in the early days of the grass-roots creation, because the profit was too low, so it decided not to do packaging. However, Jiang Shangyi emphasized to Zhang that the packaging he was talking about was not an ordinary semiconductor package.
Jiang Shangyi said, Moore's law is about to stop, we see that there are a lot of packaging bottlenecks, the packaging industry for decades, so that the price has been lowered, TSMC CMOS image sensing can do all products, of course, it will make a little change in the packaging industry. And there are still thousands of variations in the packaging industry.
Recently, due to the explosion of demand for Nvidia's AI chips, the CODOS advanced packaging capacity has been greatly rammed. Jiang Shangyi said that it was at that time that he mentioned Cogos to the founder. At that time, he mentioned to Zhang that the packaging technology has created a bottleneck, and we can replace it with our technology!Jiang Shangyi called this technology "advanced packaging", and Zhang Zhongmou immediately understood, and asked how many resources do you need?Jiang Shangyi replied, I want 400 engineers and 100 million dollars of equipment. He immediately agreed. The next day, he hired people, and later TSMC made Codos advanced packaging technology.
After the results were made, there was no business in Copos at first. Jiang Shangyi recalled the tragic situation at that time, When I was doing cowos, many people told me, you should do this quickly, but they didn't use it when it was done!I was miserable, and I became a joke in the company, so I had to go around talking to customers. 」
Jiang Shangyi recalled that once during dinner, he chatted with a vice president of Qualcomm, and the other party took the initiative to mention why not cowos?He said, "If you sell me a dollar for a mini miter square, I'm going to use it." Jiang Shangyi complained to the other party, why didn't you tell me earlier?The vice president of Qualcomm replied, "How do I know you don't even know this." 」
Jiang Shangyi said that this incident taught him a great lesson, that is, "being an engineer cannot be done behind closed doors." Later, he went back to Yu Zhenhua (currently the vice president of TSMC's system integration forward-looking R&D department) and asked him to calculate how much cowos was. He said a mini miter square is 7 cents, and I told the customer that he didn't want it, so we'll make a 1 cent, and you reduce that performance a little bit. Yu Zhenhua is very powerful, and he made it a year later, and that product is info, and it sold well after it came out. 」
Jiang Shangyi said that at that time, COFOS was still a new technology that had just emerged, and it was too high for anyone to dare to use. He also broke the news that the first customer who dared to use CoCows products was Huawei. As for the popularity now, it is mainly because of AI. When we started CODOS for GPUs, I didn't expect AI to come out. 」
Jiang Shangyi currently serves as the chief semiconductor strategy officer of Hon Hai Group, directly responsible to Chairman Liu Yangwei, and concurrently serves as the chairman of Hon Hai's packaging and testing subsidiary, Xunxin-KY at the end of June this year.
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