Cliff Hou named Chief Information Security Officer at TSMC

TSMC named Cliff Hou as its Chief Information Security Officer, effective January 1, 2025. He was promoted from the role of Senior Vice President and Deputy Co-COO at TSMC.

According to TSMC, it established a dedicated information security organization called Global Security Management, and as CISO, Hou is in charge of planning, monitoring and management of its information security policies and procedures. According to TSMC, Hou was also deputy of Y.P. Chyn at the time of the report. According to TSMC, the CISO chairs its Proprietary Information Protection and Risk Committee, whose members include the Vice Presidents of Operations, Legal, Human Resources and Research and Development. The CISO also chairs TSMC's IT Security Committee, which at the time of the report brought together the Information Technology Vice President and Directors in monthly meetings, the company said.

TSMC says that in August 2018 Hou served as Vice President of Technology Development, after being its Vice President of Design and Technology Platform between August 2011 and July 2018. The company also lists Senior Vice President roles in Technology Development and in Europe and Asia Sales among his TSMC experience. According to TSMC, Hou joined the company in 1997 and, through 2007, set up its organizations for reference flow and technology design kit development. TSMC says that over the last decade Hou led development of its Open Innovation Platform. Before TSMC, he was a design environment section manager at the Industrial Technology Research Institute's Computer & Communications Research Laboratories in Taiwan, the company says. According to the company, at the time of the report Hou sat on the Board of Directors of Global Unichip Corp. and held 44 U.S. patents. He holds a Syracuse University Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Control Engineering from Taiwan's National Chiao-Tung University, TSMC says.

TSMC's Board of Directors has made the Audit and Risk Committee responsible for supervising and managing corporate information security, the company says. According to TSMC, Global Security Management executives report to that committee every six months on risk management measures, including policies, plans and implementation results.