This article comes from Business Weekly, Wu Zhongjie's article.
He changed the technological path of the global semiconductor industry and let the big brothers Intel and equipment makers ASML, Nikon and other industry giants abandon the research efforts that cost more than one billion US dollars and several years, followed him to turn with TSMC. Not only has global semiconductor manufacturing progressed six to seven generations in the past, it has taken about 14 years, and TSMC has also become one of the leading manufacturers in the industry.
He is the academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lin Benjian, and the former vice president of R&D for TSMC. TSMC chairman Zhang Zhongmou once said that without Lin Benjian and his team, "Taiwan Semiconductor's lithography (one of the semiconductor key processes) will not have this scale today."
After retiring, Lin Benjian, a distinguished professor of lectures at Tsinghua University, recently published his first semi-autobiographical book and relived with us how he reversed the situation.
Born in Vietnam, Lin Bianjian came to Taiwan to study at adolescence. The subordinates nicknamed him “Burn (the English name) Grandpa.” He treats people kindly, but he does not give up on what he believes.
His proposal, co-ordination with the owners
"Although millions of people, I'm going!" Lin Bianjian described his rewrite of history from 2002 to 2004.
At that time, the situation was as follows: As the semiconductor process evolved, the lithography, one of the key processes, had to continue to shorten the beam wavelength. The industry has long been accustomed to using air as the medium, and it is a “dry” lithography, but this However, the technology has “crashed the wall” at the 157 nm wavelength. However, Lin Bingjian, who was at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., was able to escape the framework and returned to the previous generation of 157 nm wavelengths. The water was used as a medium to develop “infiltrating lithography”. Technology, to shorten the beam wavelength to 134 nm, breaking the bottleneck.
This kind of broken-box thinking was initially lonely and even hostile.
Because other companies have invested more than one billion U.S. dollars in R&D expenditures on dry development, they are close to TSMC’s capital spending for the entire year. If Lin Benjian's theory is adopted, it is equal to declaring that other people are doing their best. The previous chief operating officer of TSMC, Jiang Shangyi, wrote for Lin Benjian. Preface: "(Current year) There are indeed high-level executives of big companies who express serious concerns. I hope I can manage him (Lin Benjian) and not stir the game."
Before he does his work, he will deduct to exhaustion
Internally, Lin Benjian asked Jiang Shangyi and Zhang Zhongmou to pay the bills, and foreigners would have to persuade the industry to abandon the original input.
His secret is to "completely" two words, to think thoroughly, and to carry out thoroughly. "Like chess, we must first think of several steps behind," says Lin Ben-jian. Before doing anything, he deduces it to exhaustion. He has always been Habits, "Take all possible thoughts, (until) think impossible."
A TSMC executive who had been with Lin Bingjian recalled that at the beginning, the opposition often opposed TSMC in an international seminar, questioning that water as a medium was prone to pollution, and that bubbles in the water would affect exposure. Lin Bingjian, who was prepared, decided to solve the problem more thoroughly. He took the team to complete three papers in half a year, submitted it to an international journal, and even conceived doubts that had not yet been submitted. Response: “Originally an American manufacturer The representative said that they would never use this technology. As a result, after a (semiconductor process) generation, they also used it."
In addition to reasoning, Lin Bianjian’s communication has also been thorough. At that time he traveled to the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany to meet the industry one by one, prompting Asmael and Nikon to turn to other manufacturers. He said that communication was his job from Zhang Zhongmou. Learn an important lesson.
Since he joined TSMC in 2000, Zhang Zhongmou had fixed lunch with the third-tier executives two times a week for lunch, and the deputy general managers had monthly meetings. During the meeting, Zhang Zhongmou and the executives can talk about the development of the company to the international political economy. The situation, including TSMC’s core values of “integrity, integrity,” “commitment,” etc., also condenses. “The chairman of the board encourages everyone to ask him questions. Sometimes when everyone asks well, he is happy to answer. have eaten. "
"Think thoroughly, thoroughly, it's his habit." For example, Huang Xiuhui, who had been with Lin Bianjian's 50-year-old wife, served as a commander of the church choir. Many members were not good at reading the staves. They encountered repeated paragraph symbols and often forgot to recount. The general commander constantly corrects and reminds, but Lin Ben-jian completely solves the problem and replays the score. The spectrum after the repetition is directly written out so that everyone can sing smoothly.
He is thorough, but he knows more about detours in case of problems.
However, Lin Ben-keung’s “completeness” is with cleverness. He thinks that in the face of difficulties, sometimes it may be better to stop, rest, even bypass, and then advance. It will be better than merely following the path of his predecessors, blindly saying, “The Yugong moves its mountains.” When he proposed infiltration 2. The lithography is a way out of the usual path of the industry.
"He often said that imagination can be endless, but when it is actually used, be cautious. He never suppresses any thoughts of the engineer." The aforementioned director of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. said that Lin Benjian encourages subordinates to imagine it so that innovation can happen.
After starting teaching at the university two years ago, Lin Bianjian also hoped that students would not become "slaves" for the duck education. He encouraged students to cooperate and required some assignments to be completed in teams, just as he used to reverse the rules of semiconductors. He proposed the idea one by one. Afterwards, he needed the support of Zhang Zhongmou and Jiang Shangyi and others, and he found an allies in order to practice epoch-making technology.
"I hope that we can pass on some valuable things to the next generation as much as possible." Like the original intention of writing books, Lin Benjian, 76, has continued to use the school as a platform to teach thinking and practice.