Cliff Hou

Cliff Hou is Senior Vice President, Deputy Co-COO and Chief Information Security Officer of TSMC, having been appointed CISO effective January 1, 2025. He was promoted into the role from his position as Senior Vice President and Deputy Co-COO, a post TSMC's board had confirmed effective March 1, 2024.

Career path

Hou began his career at TSMC in 1997. From 1997 to 2007 he established the company's technology design kit and reference flow development organizations. He went on to serve as Senior Director, Design and Technology Platform, before being named Vice President of Design and Technology Platform from August 2011 to July 2018. In August 2018 he became Vice President of Technology Development, and he subsequently held the titles of Senior Vice President, Technology Development, and Senior Vice President, Europe and Asia Sales, at TSMC. He was then appointed Senior Vice President and Deputy Co-COO effective March 1, 2024, before taking on the CISO title on January 1, 2025.

Before joining TSMC, Hou was a section manager specializing in design environment at the Computer & Communications Research Laboratories of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI/CCL) in Taiwan, and he also served as an Associate Professor at Kaohsiung Polytechnic Institute, now known as I-Shou University. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a B.S. in Control Engineering from National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan.

Design ecosystem work and board role

Over his years leading design technology at TSMC, Hou led development of the company's Open Innovation Platform (OIP), described by TSMC as the most comprehensive design ecosystem in the global semiconductor industry. He received the National Manager Excellence Award in 2010 for pioneering reference flows and design-for-manufacturing work that lowered IC design barriers, and he led the OIP project team to win the first National Industry Innovation Award from Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2011. Hou holds 44 U.S. patents and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Global Unichip Corp.

Information security remit

As CISO, Hou leads TSMC's Global Security Management organization, which was established to carry out information security policy and procedure planning, monitoring and management. He chairs the company's Proprietary Information Protection and Risk Committee, which works with TSMC's information technology and related organizations to strengthen information security protection and management mechanisms. Every six months, Global Security Management executives report risk management measures to TSMC's Audit and Risk Committee, covering global information security trends, company policies, plans and implementation results.