Ching Ping Wong was born in Guangzhou in March 1947 and, after completing his primary and secondary education in Hong Kong, studied in the United States, taking a bachelor's degree from Purdue University and a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship under the Nobel chemistry laureate Henry Taube. He began his research career at Bell Labs, working on polymers and packaging, and specialised in electronic packaging and polymer materials. His best-known contribution was pioneering the encapsulation of gated diode switches with silicone resin, achieving hermetic sealing through polymer materials comparable to ceramic packaging while improving reliability and cutting weight and cost — work for which he is widely called a founding figure of semiconductor packaging. He spent much of his career at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a Regents' Professor and the Charles Smithgall Institute Endowed Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, publishing widely and training many packaging researchers, and he has also worked on 3D packaging and nanomaterials and lectured frequently in Hong Kong. Elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2000, he is also a Foreign Associate of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a founding member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences, an Academician of Academia Sinica and an IEEE Fellow. In 2010 he was appointed Dean of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he promoted local microelectronics, packaging and materials research; in 2019 he became a Senior Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study, and he is now an emeritus professor at CUHK. He has long collaborated with several Hong Kong universities, bringing packaging technology and a network of researchers back to the city.
Ching Ping Wong's silicone-resin packaging broke the limits of ceramic sealing, making electronic components lighter, cheaper and more reliable and helping turn electronic packaging into a discipline of its own; he trained generations of packaging researchers at Georgia Tech and CUHK, and as CUHK's Dean of Engineering from 2010 strengthened Hong Kong's position in microelectronics research.
Achievements
- 2000 · Elected to the US National Academy of Engineering.
- 2010 · Appointed Dean of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- 2019 · Appointed a Senior Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study.