He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1984, and was Vice Chairman of the EECS department and Director of the Berkeley Microfabrication Laboratory before he returned to Hong Kong to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in August 1993, where he served as the Dean of Engineering from May 1994 to July 1999.

At Berkeley, Professor Ko focusing on understanding the physics of MOS technology and devices, and developing CAD tools for the design of integrated circuits. Some notable results of this effort are the Berkeley Short-channel IGFET Models (BSIM’s) and the Berkeley Reliability Tools (BERT), which are being used worldwide by IC design engineers. In particular, BSIM was established as an industry standard in 1996.

For his contribution to the development of device models used for IC design, Professor Ko was awarded the 2002 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award. Professor Ko holds six patents, and has authored or co-authored one book and over 200 research papers. He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers(HKIE).

In 2003, Prof Ko joined in Wearnes Technology Group and took on Chairman and President of Wearnes Semiconductor focusing on the semiconductor development in China and an idea of collection of various top-notch fablesss IC Design house called IC Federation entered his mind. In order to speed up the federation’s growth, he actively negotiated with Wearnes Technology Group and bought off Wearnes Semiconductor through the new investor, Silicon Federation International (SFI), an offshore venture company. SFI consists of more than 10 member companies and each of the investees is top-notch in its own area of specialization.

Professor Ko is also adjunct professor at both Tsinghua University and Peking University and at the same time, actively involve himself in the IC development of Shenzhen Industrialized Base.