New center planning to train more chip designers

"We hope with the opening of this new center that the semiconductor industry can continue to push forward our economy."

Shih Yen-hsiang, vice minister of economic affairs

Officials and analysts yesterday welcomed a new training center in the Nankang Software Park (南港軟體園區) in Taipei's eastern suburbs that aims to provide more engineering talent for the nation's burgeoning chip-design industry.

The Semiconductor Training Center aims to have 1,750 engineers enrolled by the end of this year, and forms part of the integrated circuit (IC) design center in a designated 13-story building, the park administration said at an official opening ceremony yesterday.

"This training center is very important as right now the chip-design industry is very short of talent," said George Wu (吳裕良), a chip-industry analyst at Primasia Securities Co in Taipei. "The industry is spending money on development faster than freshmen are coming in."

As chips become more complex and more circuits are crammed onto the same piece of silicon, chip design has become a critical part of new product development.

The reduction of circuits to near atomic-level proportions has also allowed chip designers to integrate multiple chips -- like memory and the main processor -- into one, creating a new category of chip dubbed system-on-chip (SOC).

But SOC designers are scarce.

"Because of the cost and immaturity of the SOC industry at present, companies are very dependent on finding the right talent," Wu said.

The head of the new training center agreed.

"Beyond new products and innovations, personnel is the most important asset of the semiconductor industry," said Ren Jian-wei (任建葳), who is also a professor of electronics at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu."We need to upgrade the level of IC design training in our students, so the government's training center here in the Nankang Software Park is a very important program."

By 2006, the government aims to have a local IC design industry worth NT$520 billion, more than three and a half times the NT$148 billion achieved by the industry last year, Chen Chao-yi (陳昭義), director-general of Industrial Development Bureau under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said yesterday.

The total semiconductor industry is expected to reach approximately NT$1.6 trillion by then.

As more of the nation's computer hardware manufacturing moves to countries like China where labor is much cheaper than Taiwan, the government is keen to promote research and development and high-technology manufacturing to fill the gap and ensure continued economic growth.

"We hope with the opening of this new center that the semiconductor industry can continue to push forward our economy," Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-hsiang (施顏祥) said yesterday.

The concentration of design talent in Nankang is also attracting international names.

"Taiwan has very strong know-how in the information technology industry and now it is transforming its manufacturing base to research and development related industries," said Toshiyuki Takinaga, president of Sony Taiwan Ltd. "Sony recognized this and has established its systems engineering center here."

Sony invested NT$3 billion in two design centers at the Nankang park back in February. Germany's Infineon Technologies AG also has a design center in the same building.