The Testing Giant You May Not Know — and Why Nvidia Can’t Ship Chips Without It

Liang-rong Chen

Hello everyone,

Perhaps because I previously wrote “Hunting the Defector,” an in-depth report tracing Liang Mong-Song’s move to Samsung—and because I also wrote a detailed piece this July about the retirement of TSMC’s former Senior Vice President of R&D, Wei-Jen Lo (羅唯仁)—many people have recently asked for my thoughts after multiple media outlets reported that Lo may have “defected with documents” to Intel. I’d like to clarify everything here once and for all.

First, Lo, now 75, took a job with a competitor after retiring without informing his supervisors or colleagues. From a standpoint of personal loyalty, it’s hard to justify — but it isn’t illegal.

As I wrote previously, former MediaTek（聯發科） General Counsel Wei-Fu Hsu（許維夫） told me that even if Lo had signed a non-compete agreement with TSMC restricting him from joining a competitor (including Intel) for a period after retirement, such a clause would be invalid under California law.

To protect employee mobility in the tech sector, non…