Making a Semiconductor Superpower: The Seven Engineers from KAIST Who Shaped the Chip Industry
About this ebook
“They were called ‘Kim’s Mafia.’ Kim Choong-Ki himself wouldn’t have put it that way. But it was true what semiconductor engineers in South Korea whispered about his former students: They were everywhere. ... Kim was the first professor in South Korea to systematically teach semiconductor engineering. From 1975, when the nation had barely begun producing its first transistors, to 2008, when he retired from teaching, Kim trained more than 100 students, effectively creating the first two generations of South Korean semiconductor experts.” (Source: IEEE Spectrum, October, 2022.)
About the author
Dong-Won Kim is a historian of science and technology. After receiving his Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University in 1991, he was a professor and dean at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has also taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting professor or lecturer. His major research fields are the history of physics and the history of science and technology in Korea and Japan. He has published several papers on these subjects, as well as two monographs: Leadership and Creativity: A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1919 (Springer, 2002) and Yoshio Nishina: Father of Modern Physics in Japan (Taylor & Francis, 2007). His next project is on cosmic ray research in the first half of the twentieth century.
