President Lin co-founded Andes Technology Corporation (Andes) in 2005 and in 2006 he formally took the position as Andes’ President. President Lin received a BSEE degree of electrophysics from the National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, and an MSEE degree of electrical and computer engineering from Portland State University, Oregon, USA. Under his management, Andes has been recognized as one of leading suppliers of embedded CPU IP in the semiconductor industry. Andes also gained the reputation of a leading technology company with awards including the “2012 EE Times Worldwide Silicon 60 Hot Startups to Watch” and the “2015 the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific award”. In 2015, President Lin received the accolade award of “Outstanding Technology Management Performance, Taiwan” for his contribution to the high-tech industry. Check out our interview with Frankwell below:
What personal projects will you be working on this weekend? Are you building anything cool? Any electronics or software projects, for example?
This weekend will be a family team build-up. It happens that my son and daughter-in-law will have a first family travel trip together with my wife and me. We feel excited and are looking forward to having a new family member. We are expecting it but feel a little nervous about the water boating activity.
What advice would you give to early-career engineers/people wanting to get into your vertical market/people wanting to start a company in the current climate/etc?
I would suggest that other than professional knowledge and the technology product ideas he or she may have, he also has to build a team that can co-work with him for a long enough time because it will be high or low seasons during his founding time. Besides healthy finance plans for both personal and the team will be required.
What was your first job in the industry?
I was a product application engineer at United Microelectronics Corporation. UMC was an IDM company at that time. So, my first job was being the field application engineer for the chip products newly developed in UMC.
What advice would you give to your younger self? OR What advice do you wish you had when you graduated?
I will encourage the younger myself to train my body for keeping good health. As we work for a long time, like decades, health is always the number one priority. That’s the advice I will give myself.
What personal technology could you not be without?
I think that the “mobile phone” and the “laptop” are the required personal technology for me. After getting up and before I go to bed, I guess that we use the mobile phone for half of the time and the laptop for another half of the time.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your career, and how did you overcome it?
When I cofound Andes, there’s nearly one decade, every year, we lost profit. So the funds from our startup, the funds size became a challenge and was the biggest challenge in my career. So we processed capital increases, and the capital reduction, a couple of times to adjust the financial health of the company. We also did a lot to promote the team and product to the industry with a good quality design of proprietary CPU. We are glad that we overcome it. We went IPO in year 2017 and started to do the RISC-V design.