Back to EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2026 award winners

Dr. Byung Joon Han​​​

Co-founder, CEO and Board Director, Silicon Box Pte Ltd​

EY Entrepreneur Of The Year – Advanced Manufacturing​

Dr. BJ Han is a seminal figure in semiconductor manufacturing, possessing 300+ global patents. Over his 40-year career, he delivered industry leading execution for global customers, and invented semiconductor packaging technologies most widely used today. BJ has won numerous accolades in celebration of these achievements.​

Beginning his career at IBM, then as Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs, BJ has collaborated and trained with Nobel laureates. He led R&D at Amkor Technology, then the world’s top outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) organization. In 1999, BJ joined Singapore-based STATS as Chief Technology Officer, then CEO/Chairman, taking it from US$100m to over US$4b in annual revenue, and the world’s third-largest OSAT.​

BJ co-founded Silicon Box in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, with partners Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai. Defying expectations, he built its flagship factory in 11 months. Silicon Box is the fastest growing, independent semiconductor manufacturing company to date, demonstrating industry leading yields in mass production (2025), and achieving a US$1.7b valuation (2026).​

Soon after opening the Singapore factory, BJ committed US$3.7b to establish Europe’s first-of-its-kind packaging plant in Italy, winning a US$1.5b grant from the European Commission. Despite widespread cynicism, BJ expressed optimism in Italy and Europe, promising a new European Renaissance in semiconductor manufacturing, winning the Leonardo International Prize in 2025 for his contributions.​

As an external consultant for Bain, BJ advised on key deals defining the chip industry. He is a board member of numerous initiatives and semiconductor companies. BJ received his PhD from Columbia University and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard University.​

About Silicon Box Pte Ltd​

Silicon Box drives the future of chip innovation via advanced semiconductor packaging technology. As global demand for more powerful, efficient chips grows, Silicon Box delivers breakthrough capability and capacity required to support sustainable, scalable development for many cutting-edge applications, including AI, data centers, space programs, robotics, electric vehicles and communications.​

Founded on a mission to enable chiplets: a revolutionary way of designing systems chips through a modular, building-block approach, Silicon Box’s advanced packaging features the shortest lengths for interconnection of chiplets, currently essential for AI chips.​

Silicon Box deploys its proprietary know-how at panel scale with proven yield in mass production. The ability to execute advanced packaging at panel scale vs. traditional wafer scale allows Silicon Box to support the boundless ambitions of chiplet designers and unlock critical manufacturing capacity to address bottlenecks in advanced packaging capacity.​

Silicon Box supports global customers, heavily concentrated in the US and Europe.​