The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering co-hosted a screening of “A Chip Odyssey,” Taiwan’s first feature-length documentary chronicling how the island of 23 million people became the world’s indispensable hub for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
Nearly 200 guests, including UCLA Samueli faculty members whose research centers on semiconductors, attended the Nov. 8 event at the William M.W. Mong Memorial Learning Center in Engineering VI. Master of ceremonies Hsian-Rong Tseng, the event’s organizer and a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, welcomed the audience. He was followed by opening remarks from UCLA Samueli faculty speakers — Yang Yang, chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department, and Kang Wang, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. The Honorable Amino Chi, director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, which co-hosted the event, also shared insights on Taiwan’s decadeslong ascent to become the world’s largest chip maker.
The 106-minute documentary opens with its director’s quest to unearth the site of a pivotal 1974 meeting held in a hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese breakfast shop. It was there that seven senior government officials, including then-economics minister Yun-hsuan Sun, and top engineers such as Radio Corporation of America Laboratories director Wen-yuan Pan met over soymilk and fried dough sticks to cement a multimillion-dollar plan that launched Taiwan’s semiconductor revolution. After sifting through reams of old phone books and building maps, the film crew eventually traced the location to the second floor of a well-known test-prep center established in 1965. The space has since been converted into one of many classrooms where more than half a million Taiwanese students have prepared to apply to colleges and graduate schools in the U.S.
More than 80 engineers, scientists and policymakers were interviewed for the film, which also includes archival clips of Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chip foundry whose clients include Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Sony, Tesla, Amazon among many others. The documentary follows Taiwan’s semiconductor development from the early days of young engineers traveling to the U.S. for training at the RCA to today’s massive chip fabs in Taiwan and around the world. It was a strategic gamble that paid off. Some of the first-generation pioneers of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry were moved to tears as they recounted their arduous journey and several passed away before the film’s release in June, the filmmakers noted.
After a post-screening reception, the film’s director, Chu-chen Hsiao, and producers Ben Chen and Ben Tsiang participated in a fireside chat about making the documentary during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion was moderated by UCLA professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies Michael Berry, with UCLA cultural and comparative studies doctoral student Yige Wu serving as the Mandarin-English interpreter.
“I think the media exposure of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry has focused on the stock market or TSMC or Morris Chang,” Tsiang said, as interpreted by Wu. “These are very well-known people and companies, but we want to spotlight the unknown stories — how everything started from zero? And in that way, we also hoped to leave a historical record for our audience.”
Event co-hosts included the Southern California Monte Jade Science and Technology Association, the UCLA Asia Pacific Center and the UCLA Anderson School’s Center for Global Management.