Semiconductor History | NCKU Future Venue, 30 March 2022 — The Passive Parts Behind Every Active Chip

A chip resistor can vanish beneath a fingertip. On 30 March 2022, YAGEO (國巨) made that smallness the subject of a room-sized gathering inside National Cheng Kung University’s Future Venue (成大未來館) in Tainan. The university and YAGEO held “2022 YAGEO DAY 國巨日” here, combining a passive-component paper competition, scholarship awards, and a talk by YAGEO chairman and NCKU alumnus Pierre Chen (陳泰銘). The venue was not a fab or a product launch; it was a look at the research and people behind components that most users never notice. Passive components do not execute instructions. Resistors control current and voltage, capacitors store and release charge, and inductors oppose changes in current; that quiet work surrounds every processor and memory package on a board. YAGEO’s history began in 1977 with resistor-related production, then expanded from chip resistors into capacitors, inductors, wireless components, and circuit protection. By the time of this event, the group included KEMET and Pulse, so a Taiwan company that had grown from resistors could present students with problems spanning electronic ceramics, materials, power, and high-frequency design. The NCKU-YAGEO joint research center connected campus work with the group’s research organization in Kaohsiung. NCKU records teams from materials science, resource engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and shared research facilities; the 2022 competition made that relationship visible. Taiwan’s electronics history is often pinned to wafer fabs, yet a finished circuit also depends on the passive parts placed around the silicon. This day turned a supply-chain category into faces, papers, and a place. Future Venue is the restored former main library on NCKU’s Sheng-Li Campus. Its broad exterior stairs and long gridded façade still face the campus today; the place where YAGEO asked students to look closely at tiny components remains an active university space. Image note: The cover shows NCKU Future Venue. The second photograph shows a generic 3216-size chip resistor, not a YAGEO-made part. Sources: NCKU News Center, “2022 Yageo Day at NCKU”; YAGEO 2022 ESG Report; NCKU Virtual Campus; OpenStreetMap building record, checked 26 August 2026. Photos: Yu tptw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Haragayato, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons