A Taiwanese technology expert moving to China to work for an integrated circuit (IC) talent incubator is likely to hurt Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, an official from the Allied Association for Science Park Industries said on Friday.
Association director Sam Lin (林錫銘) said that with China preparing to create its own semiconductor industry, he feared that Liu Chung-laung’s (劉炯朗) presence at the center in Jinjiang, Fujian Province, would hurt Taiwan’s competitiveness in the global market.
Xinhua news agency earlier this week reported that Liu, chairman of Taipei-based market advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) and the president of National Tsing Hua University from 1998 to 2002, is leading the center in Fujian.
A computer scientist, Liu is has close ties with Taiwan’s academic and industrial circles.
He is an independent director on the board of contract chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the second-largest contract chipmaker in Taiwan.
Liu would work with IC talent development organizations in Taiwan to help the Jinjiang center build a teaching team and bolster its training resources to turn it into a hub for training specialists for China’s semiconductor industry, Xinhua said.
The Jinjiang center opened on Wednesday, when the city hosted a forum on IC talent exchanges across the Taiwan Strait, it said.
It said the Jinjiang center is expected to train 12,600 specialists for the industry over the next 10 years.
Lin, who is also chief executive officer of Taiwan-based IC designer Weltrend Semiconductor Inc (偉詮電子), said the nation’s IC industry is suffering from a brain drain as Chinese companies lure Taiwanese experts with attractive compensation packages.
He urged the government to stem the talent outflow and protect the local IC sector.
In another prominent case of talent flight, UMC vice chairman Sun Shih-wei (孫世偉) earlier this year started working for Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd (清華紫光), a Chinese IC firm backed by Beijing.
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