Jackson is a 30-year veteran in the semiconductor industry with 25 years in IC design in the Silicon Valley and 5.5 years in foundry in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Prior to joining WI Harper as a Venture Partner, Jackson was the Chairman and CEO of UMC, the world’s second largest semiconductor foundry. During his presidency, UMC achieved its record annual revenue of US$3.7B in UMC history.

Prior to his UMC leadership, Jackson had contributed to the success of four start-up companies: SiRF, IC Ensemble, S3 and Verticom. From 1996-2002, Dr. Hu took on the role of CEO for SiRF Technology. In six years, he helped raise five-round of funding for totally $75M and developed three generations of GPS technologies. SiRF had a vision of bringing GPS, which was originally designed for military purposes, into mass commercial and consumer applications, including car navigation, telematics, cell phone, PND, location based service, etc. Jackson made SiRF’s vision a reality, and SiRF became the #1 GPS chip supplier.

In 1997, Jackson co-founded and chaired IC Ensemble, an audio codec and controller fabless IC design firm. IC Ensemble was acquired by Via Technology in 2000. From 1990 to 1996, Jackson was with S3 and responsible for the development of S3's graphics IC products. During S3, he went through the dramatic cutback (50% employees and 16 out of 17 chips) in its early days. He and his graphics team successfully developed the industry's first GUI accelerator and helped make S3 a graphics leader. At S3, Dr. Hu was promoted from Director of Engineering to Senior Vice President and General Manager.

Prior to S3, Jackson joined Verticom, which originally targeted graphics terminal market and later re-directed its business to high-end PC graphics IC and card. Jackson started his career as a design engineer and design manager for microprocessors at Zilog.

Jackson has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.

Contact Dr. Jackson Hu:
jhu@wiharper.com