Craig Addison

Opinion | Are Taiwan’s job-hopping chip engineers traitors or patriots?

Ex-TSMC executives Liang Meng-song and Chiang Shangyi are two of the most visible examples of the hundreds of chip professionals who have crossed the strait

In a recent high profile case, Taipei prosecutors charged a headhunting firm with illegally poaching Taiwanese engineers for a Chinese AI chip company

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TSMC founder Morris Chang seen speaking at a forum in Taipei on April 21, 2021, where he called on the Taiwan government to hold on tightly to its chip expertise. Photo: Bloomberg

Craig Addison

Published: 6:00am, 28 Apr 2021Updated: 6:00am, 28 Apr 2021

Beijing is engaged in multiple efforts to cultivate its local semiconductor talent, but knows that the fastest way to achieve self reliance in the technology is to poach talent from Taiwan – where the engineers not only speak the same language, they have experience working in the world’s most advanced chip fabs.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker, has borne the brunt of that poaching, and it seems that the company’s founder, 89-year-old Morris Chang who retired nearly three years ago, has had enough

Chiang Shangyi says he is free to pursue his own career, but critics say he broke a promise he made on retirement from TSMC. Photo: Handout

In rare public remarks last week, Chang was quoted as saying, “It’s very difficult to create such a flagship chip industry over years, and it’s also very challenging to keep this edge.

“I call on the [Taiwan] government, society and TSMC to keep hold of it tightly,” he added.

Two of the most visible examples of the hundreds of semiconductor professionals who have jumped across the strait are Liang Meng-song and Chiang Shangyi, who are now working for mainland China’s chip champion Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) – and who are both branded as traitors in Taiwan.

Chiang says he is free to pursue his own career, but critics point out that he has gone against a promise he made on retirement from TSMC to “never do anything to harm” the company.

However much Chiang is reviled in Taiwan, it isn’t as bad Liang, who was found to have handed over TSMC’s trade secrets to Samsung Electronics by the Taiwan Supreme Court in 2015.