Give Me a Lab and I Will Raise the Chip Industry:
University–Industry Kinship, Trust Labor, and the Making of Taiwan’s Semiconductor Infrastructure in the Post–Cold War Era
Sharon Tsai-Hsuan Ku, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU)
Abstract
This talk examines how Taiwan became a critical node in the global semiconductor supply chain during the late and post–Cold War transition. Drawing on STS and infrastructure studies, I analyze Taiwan’s IC design industry through interconnected laboratories, engineering education, and service institutions linking universities and local enterprises.
I propose the concept of “university–industry kinship” to explain how personalized trust networks, tacit knowledge transmission, and small-firm engineering culture organized semiconductor production under conditions shaped by global supply chain demands and local infrastructural scarcity. Tracing the co-evolution of engineering education, industrial expansion, and Taiwan’s post–Cold War political transition, I argue that semiconductors are both products of locally embedded sociomaterial networks and global geopolitical forces, and infrastructures through which competing geopolitical futures — including regional militarization and divergent visions of AI-driven societies — are being imagined and built in the emerging New Cold War.
Biography
Sharon Tsai-Hsuan Ku is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan. Trained in engineering and STS, her research focuses on the sociology of precision and the geopolitics of standardization, particularly in nanotechnology and semiconductors. She also leads NYCU’s Global Engineering Humanities education program.
Location
STS Seminar Room / Universitätsstraße 7 (staircase II / 6th floor) 1010 Vienna & online via Zoom (meeting ID: 640 1339 7094, passcode: 990830)