Introduction

After earning a master's degree in electrical engineering at Texas Tech University, Jimmy Lee, like thousands of other immigrant engineers, was drawn to Silicon Valley in the late 1970s. Lee worked for nearly a decade at established companies such as Signetics and National Semiconductor as well as at a start-up, International CMOS Technology, before joining a classmate from National Taiwan University, K. Y. Han, to start their own semiconductor firm, Integrated Silicon Solutions, Inc. (ISSI). After bootstrapping the start-up with their own funds and those of Taiwan-born colleagues, they raised over $9 million, mainly from Asian venture capital funds managed by overseas Chinese engineers.

Lee and Han exploited their connections in both Silicon Valley and Taiwan to grow ISSI. They recruited former colleagues and classmates in the United States to the R&D center in Santa Clara, and they lined up a manufacturing partnership with the recently established foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC). They also incorporated a subsidiary in Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park to oversee assembly, packaging, and testing. In the firm's early years, Han traveled to Taiwan monthly to monitor its manufacturing operations. He soon decided to join thousands of other “returnees” and moved his family home to run ISSI-Taiwan. Lee remained in the Silicon Valley as CEO and Chairman.

ISSI grew rapidly in the early 1990s by selling high-speed SRAMs to motherboard firms that were supplying Taiwan's fast-growing personal computer (PC) industry.