Artifact Details

Description

Dr. Hu describes a last-minute escape from China to Taiwan in 1949 where, though poor, he had what he describes as a “wonderful childhood”. He entered Taiwan University to study electrical engineering. He then entered graduate school at UC Berkeley where he earned a PhD four years later.
After earning his PhD, he became a professor at MIT for three years teaching mainly a course in semiconductors. After the first oil crisis, he decided he wanted to focus on energy conservation and management. When UC Berkeley asked him to take part in just such a program, he jumped at the chance and moved back to the west coast. Although he was quite successful in his research in this area, funding was cut short and he refocused to doing consulting with industry on non-volatile memory technology.
In later work, Prof. Hu made major contributions to improving the quality of transistor models, the development of the FinFET transistor, and many other ground breaking contributions to semiconductor technology. The details behind these developments as well as a description of his three-year “sabbatical” as CTO of TSMC in Taiwan are revealed in this personal history.

Date

2013-08-14

Contributor

Aycinena, Peggy, Interviewer

Dennis, Eric, Videographer

Hu, Chenming, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

50 p.

Format

PDF

Copyright Holder

Computer History Museum

Category

Transcription

Subject

TSMC; MIT; UC Berkeley; FinFET; BSIM; IGFET; Pederson, Donald O.; non-volatile memory; UltraSim; Cadence; Celestry; Taiwan; BTA; SPICE; BERT; TCAD

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X6933.2014

Related Records

102746867

Hu, Chenming oral history