Marking a Historic Achievement as the First Taiwanese Semiconductor Company to Receive This Prestigious Honor

HSINCHU, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Macronix International Co., Ltd. (TSE: 2337), a leading integrated device manufacturer in the non-volatile memory (NVM) market, today announced its independently developed industrial production optimization platform, the sNOVA system, has been awarded the IEEE Milestone Award, making Macronix the first semiconductor company in Taiwan to receive this prestigious honor.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional technical organization, held a recognition ceremony on November 2. Jill Gostin, 2026 IEEE president-elect, presented the recognition plaque to Dr. Miin Wu, chairman and CEO of Macronix. The recognition honors the technology's far-reaching impact on industrial development and its significant contribution to society. Dr. Cheng-Wen Wu, minister of Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), was also invited to attend the ceremony and join distinguished guests in witnessing this important milestone in Taiwan's technology industry.

Jill Gostin, 2026 IEEE President-Elect, stated that sNOVA revolutionized the use and management of engineering information. Through the development of sNOVA, the company demonstrated how advanced computational tools could help engineers better understand complex systems, make more informed decisions, and unlock new possibilities for engineering analysis. What makes this achievement especially noteworthy is that it represented more than a successful technology. It reflected a willingness to anticipate future needs and invest in new capabilities before they became commonplace. The underlying principle behind sNOVA, transforming engineering data into meaningful insight, remains fundamental to innovation today. This Milestone recognizes the people behind the achievement. Significant advances are made possible by Macronix leaders and its team willing to challenge assumptions, solve difficult problems, and pursue ambitious goals.

Developed by Macronix between the company's founding in 1989 and 1997, the sNOVA system offers a range of outstanding features and advantages, including shortened production debugging time for abnormalities, reduced wafer-layer costs, improved product quality, and automatic precision adjustments of production machine process parameters. By pioneering the use of artificial intelligence and big data, sNOVA helped drive the digital transformation of semiconductor manufacturing. The sNOVA system has made Macronix the first semiconductor company in Taiwan to receive IEEE Milestone recognition. This achievement demonstrates the technology's far-reaching influence on Taiwan's semiconductor industry, as well as its significant contribution to semiconductor wafer production and manufacturing worldwide.

Dr. Cheng-Wen Wu of the National Science and Technology Council emphasized the significance of Macronix being the first Taiwanese semiconductor recipient of the IEEE Milestone, as it informs the world of Macronix's contribution to the global semiconductor industry. Macronix was the first company worldwide to use statistical methods to improve manufacturing efficiency, reliability, and yield. Because of the system's successful results, some Macronix employees were subsequently recruited by other companies, and the influence of the system gradually spread throughout the industry and eventually across the world.

He further noted that as AI chips increasingly need to be manufactured in Taiwan, it will be among the first to understand their application areas and strengths. This gives Taiwanese industry an opportunity to take the lead in adopting advanced AI technologies and integrating them into manufacturing processes.

Regarding Macronix becoming the first Taiwanese semiconductor company to receive IEEE Milestone recognition, Miin Wu stated that the honor represents Taiwan's indispensable and pivotal role in the history of global technological development. In 1989, Dr. Miin Wu returned from Silicon Valley and brought back more than 40 senior engineers to establish Macronix in Taiwan. At the time, with the goal of strengthening Taiwan's global semiconductor competitiveness, competing with Japanese companies, and providing customers with products of the highest quality, Macronix pioneered the employment of statisticians at a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. By combining statistical expertise with semiconductor knowledge, the company developed the industrial production optimization platform known as sNOVA.

The system helped Macronix establish the world's first paperless semiconductor wafer fabrication facility and significantly improve product quality. It also enabled Macronix to become an international pioneer in semiconductor memory manufacturing, advancing its product defect-rate measurement from the parts per million level to the parts per billion metric.

Miin Wu emphasized that sNOVA was not only a pioneer in the application of artificial intelligence and big data, but was later adopted by other leading semiconductor wafer manufacturers in Taiwan. The system helped improve chip production yield and product quality, accelerated automation throughout the semiconductor industry supply chain, and contributed to Taiwan's emergence as a critical global center for semiconductor manufacturing.

Today, Macronix is pursuing a vision of playing a central role in technology to support human health by leveraging semiconductor technology to support the medical industry and developing products that save and improve lives. In doing so, Macronix aims to ensure that technology creates not only economic value, but also meaningful benefits for society.

About IEEE Milestone

The IEEE Milestones in Electrical Engineering and Computing program honors significant technical achievements in all areas associated with IEEE.  It is a program of the IEEE History Committee, administered through the IEEE History Center. Milestones recognize the technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity found in unique products, services, seminal papers and patents.

IEEE established the Milestones Program in 1983. Each milestone recognizes a significant technical achievement that occurred at least twenty-five years ago in an area of technology represented in IEEE and having at least regional impact. To date, more than three hundred Milestones have been approved and dedicated around the world.

For more information, please visit the IEEE website: https://ethw.org/Milestones:List_of_Milestones

About Macronix International Co., Ltd.

Macronix, a leading integrated device manufacturer in the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market, provides a full range of NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products. With its world-class R&D and manufacturing capability, Macronix continues to deliver high-quality, innovative and performance driven products to its customers in the consumer, communication, computing, industrial, automotive, networking and other segment markets.

For more information, please visit the company website: www.macronix.com