DUBBED the Silicon Valley of the East, Penang became what it is today thanks to the late Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu’s foresight in 1970s.
Dr Lim’s success in bringing in The Eight Samurai in the early 1970s — Intel, Robert Bosch, Clarion, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hewlett-Packard (now split into Keysight Technologies and Agilent Technologies), Litronix (now Osram), Hitachi (now Renesas), and National Semiconductor (subsequently acquired by Texas Instruments) — planted the seeds for Malaysia’s involvement in the electronic & electrical (E&E) sector.
The semiconductor industry is one that constantly defies physics limitations — from the early vacuum tubes to the first transistor in Bell Labs and to the current ability to pack billions of transistors in a single chip.
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