It started with a straightforward offer. “You give me US$10 million over five years to set up a company and I get to innovate — to make new chips and technology.”

Under these simple terms, Nicky Lu established Etron Technology, a company that has taken Taiwan to the cutting edge in the design of semiconductor memory chips. His innovations even won Lu the ‘Nobel prize’ of electrical engineering in 1998 — the Solid-States Circuits Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Born in Hong Kong, Lu graduated from the National Taiwan University in 1975 and obtained a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He made a name for himself at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York by tripling the access speeds of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips from 60 nanoseconds to just 20 nanoseconds.

This brought Lu to the attention of Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, which asked him to join its submicron project aimed at developing expertise in DRAM chip technology. It was then that Lu, imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit learned at Stanford, set out the terms for his new business.

Etron is now an industry leader in memory products. It is the main supplier of DRAM chips to Intel, maker of the Pentium series processors found in most of today's desktop and laptop computers. Lu continues to position his business interests at the forefront of the electronics industry. He has established offshoot companies in both Taiwan and Silicon Valley, devoted to cutting-edge fields such as wireless communications and semiconductor testing, the latter of which Lu describes as “the real technological bottleneck in semiconductor production”.

Lu's business success belies his respect for research for its own sake. He recognizes that basic research can lead to technological strength. “Unlike the United States, Taiwan lacks people dedicated to the search for excellence, regardless of money, or fame,” Lu says. “Taiwan needs more ‘nerds’ dedicated to innovation.”

Etron → http://www.etron.com