Rebirth Turn of the Century

In the 1930s, Zhang Xilun, a student from Hebei Province, graduated from Jiaozuo Institute of Technology, China's first mining institution of higher learning. As a rare talent majoring in smelting, he was hired by a steel factory in Shanghai. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Shanghai's industry moved westward on a large scale, and Zhang Xilun followed the large army to Chongqing, the companion capital during the war. The steelmaking factory where he worked was incorporated into the military industrial system of the national government and became the 21st Arsenal under the Military Industry Administration.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War in 1945, the Ordnance Industry Administration sent a large number of personnel to the whole country to take over the ordnance factory left by the Japanese invaders. Zhang Xilun also came to Nanjing with his colleagues to take over the Japanese field arsenal located near Yuhuatai, and established a military factory here. The 60th Arsenal of the Works Administration. At this time, Zhang Xilun was already a well-known steel-making expert in the industry. He established a family in Nanjing and married his girlfriend whom he had known for many years. In 1948, his second child was born, named Zhang Rujing.

After the Huaihai Campaign ended, the People's Liberation Army approached the Yangtze River. Su Yu's Sanye Eighth Corps was stationed on the opposite bank of Nanjing across the river, and the 60th Arsenal began to withdraw to Taiwan in an emergency. Zhang Xilun, who was already a senior officer of the National Army, knew that he could never stay in the mainland. So he and his family took Zhang Rujing, who was still in his infancy, and followed the large army that moved to the factory. On a cloudy morning in early 1949, , boarded the ship at Xiaguan, Nanjing, and set off for Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

In addition to his family members, Zhang Xilun also took away more than two hundred young metallurgist apprentices from the arsenal. Before departure, many parents of the apprentices pleaded with Zhang Xilun to take good care of their children. In the following decades, Zhang Xilun has been a senior executive in the arsenal, and at the same time, he has taken care of more than two hundred young people like a parent, helping them to learn, get married, and get married. Zhang Xilun will always be Witnesses.

Zhang Rujing, who was brought to Taiwan when he was less than one year old, achieved excellent academic performance when he grew up. He was admitted to National Taiwan University all the way, and then went to the United States to study, and successively obtained a master's degree in engineering and a doctorate in electronics. In 1977, 29-year-old Zhang Rujing joined Texas Instruments, an American semiconductor giant, and joined the team of Jack Kilby, Nobel Prize winner in physics and inventor of integrated circuits. At Texas Instruments, Zhang Rujing started as a R\u0026D design engineer and worked for 20 years.

Since the 1960s, the Chinese have emerged in the US semiconductor industry, and talented engineers and outstanding entrepreneurs have continued to emerge. Dr. Shao Zifan, Zhang Rujing's immediate boss at Texas Instruments, is the world's top chip manufacturing factory construction expert. Under the support and cultivation of Shao Zifan, Zhang Rujing grew rapidly and participated in the construction of 9 large-scale chip factories in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Italy and other places, becoming a recognized "master of factory construction" in the industry.

Since Zhang Rujing's career centered on the United States, Zhang Xilun and his wife Liu Peijin both moved to the United States after retirement. Like countless older generations who evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan, Zhang Xilun and his wife are also people with a strong family and country complex, and they are always concerned about the mainland of the motherland. After Zhang Rujing's career flourished and he became a well-known factory construction expert in the global chip industry, Zhang Xilun asked his son this question: "When will you go to mainland China to build a factory?"

The father's question ushered in the opportunity to answer it in the late 1990s. In 1997, Zhang Rujing retired early after working in Texas Instruments for 20 years. After a short trip to the mainland (which will be mentioned later), he returned to Taiwan with the support of his old friends to start Shida Semiconductor, and quickly achieved mass production and profitability. During this period, Zhang Rujing has made a detailed plan to build a chip factory in the mainland: Shida's first and second factories will be built in Taiwan, and the third to tenth factories will all be located in the mainland.

The world is unpredictable, and the rapid rise of Shida has aroused the vigilance of the industry leader TSMC. Just when Zhang Rujing was about to make a big move, the major shareholder of Shida, without Zhang Rujing's knowledge, secretly negotiated with TSMC and sold the company to TSMC for $5 billion in January 2000. Zhang Rujing only found out about this after the fact, knowing that it would be difficult to gain a foothold in the new company after the merger, so he resigned on the second day after the acquisition without delay, and decided to go north to the mainland to start a business again.

Relying on the reputation in the industry and the successful experience of the World University, Zhang Rujing quickly gathered a group of talents and funds, and began to select the factory site. The chip industry in 2000 was not as hot as it is now. However, in Shanghai, they received a warm reception. The then mayor Xu Kuangdi personally took them to the hinterland of Pudong, which is full of farmland, and showed Zhang Rujing the large area of ​​land that Shanghai planned for them to build factories.

In April 2001, Zhang Rujing's new factory, SMIC, was established in this place called Zhangjiang Hi-Tech. For a long time afterwards, these two names occupied a very important weight in China's semiconductor industry.

In 1949, Zhang Xilun withdrew from Nanjing to Kaohsiung with 200 metallurgical apprentices, and established the large-scale Kaohsiung 60 Arsenal; in 2000, Zhang Rujing led 300 chip engineers from Taipei to Shanghai, and established the most advanced chip in mainland China. Manufacturing base.

History has completed a reincarnation between the two generations of Zhang's father and son, but the difficult journey of Zhang Rujing and SMIC, as well as the bitter past of China's semiconductor industry behind it, have just begun.

Excerpt from: "China's Sour Past"

PS: I am not in this field, and I need to check a lot of information.