National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) on Wednesday announced that it would team up with 10 of Taiwan’s largest tech firms to establish a semiconductor research college.
The college would be jointly operated with some of the larger companies in the sector, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, the university said.
Semiconductor development — such as design processes, the physics and chemistry of materials, components technology, IC design and advanced packaging — would be the college’s focus, it added.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
“We’ve invited Lin Burn-jeng (林本堅), who is well-known for developing an industry-changing immersion lithography technique, to act as dean of the college,” university president Hocheng Hong (賀陳弘) said.
Since 2016, Lin has been a distinguished research chair professor at the university. He worked for IBM in the US before returning to Taiwan to work for TSMC.
The companies would collectively invest more than NT$130 million (US$4.64 million) per year in the college, which would also receive funding from the government.
Other Taiwanese backers are GlobalWafers Co, Unimicron Technology Corp, United Microelectronics Corp, Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp, Novatek Microelectronics Co and Nanya Technology Corp, while Japan’s Tokyo Electron and the US’ Micron Technology are also onboard.
“We expect to accept 80 master’s students and 20 doctoral students each year into the college, and we will be offering a lot of scholarship money,” the university said. “We would like to begin accepting applicants as early as next spring.”
The university hopes that the college’s programs “will open students’ eyes” to the interdisciplinary nature of semiconductor development, which includes information technology, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, mathematics and other areas of study, Hocheng said.
Meanwhile, Lin said that the college would offer internationally competitive salaries to attract big-name teachers, including inviting industry elites to teach microcredit courses.
The college would also invite researchers from Academia Sinica and the US’ National Academy of Engineering, he added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods