Liang Mong Song

Liang Mong Song is a Taiwanese electronic engineer. He is the co-chief executive office of the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. He was previously an engineer at TSMC and Samsung.^[1][2]

He is an academician of the Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronics of National Tsinghua University. He is visiting professor of Sungkyunkan University. He is known as one of the "Six Knights of TSMC R&D" together with Lin Benjian, Yang Guanglei, Jiang Shangyi, Sun Yuancheng, Yu Zhenhua and others.^[3]

Liang Mong Song first obtained a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Chenggong University, and then studied under Hu Zhengming at the University of California, Berkeley.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]} After obtaining a doctorate in electrical engineering, Liang Mong Song was elected as an academician of the Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers like his tutor.^[11][12][13] He was responsible for the memory-related work of ultra-micro semiconductors.^[14][15]

According to the data of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Liang Mengsong participated in the invention of 181 semiconductor technology patents, all of which are key technical research.^[16] He has published more than 350 technical papers in Taiwan and the United States.^[17]

After returning to Taiwan in 1992, Liang Mong Song served as an engineer and senior R&D director of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. He was the inventor of nearly 500 TSMC patents,^[18][19] and was responsible for or participated in the most advanced development of each generation of TSMC's manufacturing processes. Technology,^[20][21] is also a member of the "New Process Equipment Selection Committee".^[9] In 2003, TSMC defeated IBM with its own technology. Among the TSMC R&D teams commended by the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China, Liang Mengsong, who was responsible for the 130-nanometer "copper process" advanced module, ranked second in contribution,^[22] His boss is Jiang Shangyi, senior vice president of R&D.

In February 2009, Liang Mong Song left TSMC and went to National Tsinghua University as a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Institute of Electronics. He left for South Korea more than half a year later.^[16][18][6]

Under the conditions that Samsung offered Liang three years' salary equivalent to Liang's ten years of service at TSMC and provided him with an administrative plane,^[4] Liang Mong Song agreed to join Samsung^[23][24] and at the same time took away more than 20 employees, including those from his old TSMC engineering department.^[22][6]

In order to comply with the non-compete period stipulated in the non-compete clause, Liang Mong Song began to work as a visiting professor at Sungkyunkwan University under Samsung in October 2010, and actually taught at Samsung's internal corporate training university - Samsung Semiconductor Institute of Technology.^[25] On July 13, 2011, Liang Mong Song officially joined the Samsung Group as the chief technology officer of Samsung's LSI department and was also the executive vice president of Samsung's wafer foundry.^[5]

At that time, Samsung was at the R&D bottleneck of switching from the 28-nanometer chip process to the 20-nanometer process. Liang Mengsong advocated that Samsung abandon the 20-nanometer process and directly upgrade from the 28-nanometer process to the 14-nanometer process.^[4] completed the three-generation and four-level leap at once, and later succeeded;^[4] In the end, Samsung's 14-nanometer process was mass-produced about half a year earlier than TSMC,^[9] and at the same time, TSMC launched a 16-nanometer process.^[22][5]

After Liang Mong Song assisted Samsung in successfully developing the 14-nanometer process, Samsung won the first batch of orders for the "Apple A9 processor"^[26][6] and Qualcomm's order,^[27] which were originally exclusive to TSMC in the Apple processor-related market. This made TSMC one of Apple's suppliers and caused TSMC's stock price to fall for a time, losing 80% of Apple's orders and losing US$1 billion. In October 2011, TSMC launched a four-year-old lawsuit against Liang Mong Song, accusing him of "supposedly leaking TSMC's business secrets to Samsung" since he left his job in 2009 to teach at Sungkyunkwan University.^{[14][4][25][9]}

During his tenure at Samsung Electronics, Liang Mengsong rapidly narrowed the technology gap between Samsung and TSMC, which caused his R&D results to be criticized by TSMC, and TSMC believed that Liang Mengsong was suspected of leaking trade secrets and filed a lawsuit against him. TSMC alleged in the lawsuit that from 2005 to 2009, Samsung Electronics' annual foundry revenue was less than US$400 million. Since 2010, after Samsung began to OEM Apple's A-series processors, its foundry revenue increased to 1.2 billion US dollars (of which Apple product foundry revenue reached US$800 million), reaching US$3.95 billion in 2013.^[28] South Korea has entered the wafer foundry industry where a few companies have the ability to compete; by 2018, Samsung’s wafer foundry industry Foundry revenue has climbed to approximately US$10 billion, and it is attempting to surpass TSMC again in the 3-nanometer process.^[4] TSMC believes that Samsung's process technology development is closely related to Liang Mengsong's joining. TSMC Deputy General Manager of Legal Affairs and Chief Legal Officer Fang Shuhua said: "Even if TSMC does not actively leak TSMC secrets, as long as Samsung chooses a technology direction, Liang Mengsong reminds you that this direction They can save a lot of material resources and time by not having to leave.”^[21][9][19]

An expert technical investigation report commissioned by TSMC showed that because Samsung’s product technology was licensed from IBM, its product features were originally the same as those of IBM, but very different from those of TSMC;^[22] In the years after 2009, Samsung’s 45, 32, and 28 The differences between the product features of the nano-generation and TSMC have been sharply reduced, and the products of the two companies have become extremely similar. External experts in the survey report used state-of-the-art electron microscopes to compare in detail the main structural features and component materials of the latest four-generation products of IBM, TSMC and Samsung.^[9] The results showed that Samsung and TSMC’s products are highly similar,^[22][9] if you simply analyze the product structure, you may not be able to tell where it comes from,^[22][9] so TSMC determined that Liang Mong Song had leaked relevant business secrets to Samsung,^[25] causing TSMC's technological advantages to be caught up by Samsung.^[22][18]

TSMC’s lawsuit against Liang Mong Song for infringement of business secrets failed in the first instance of the Intellectual Property Court of the Republic of China. The court agreed with Liang’s defense lawyer Gu Lixiong and ruled that the non-compete period had expired and his right to work should not be deprived. ^[29][30] TSMC appealed against the verdict. In the second instance, the Smart Court Collegiate Panel found that Sungkyunkwan University has a special relationship with Samsung, and that such corporate universities in Korea have some non-disclosure function that is beneficial to enterprises,^[30][8] so it ruled that Sungkyunkwan University Guan University had similar functions to Samsung, and together with the relevant evidence provided by TSMC, TSMC won the second instance. Liang Mong Song refused to accept the appeal, and the final verdict of the Supreme Court was: Before December 31, 2015, Liang Mong Song could not continue to provide services to Samsung in any way. This judgment is also the first time in Taiwan's court history that senior corporate executives are prohibited from working for a competitor company after the non-compete period has expired. Some media commented that this is a "historic judgment".^[22][5][19]