Ho Chi Minh City will need to add 1,600 to 2,600 microchip engineers by 2017 when the country is expected to operate its first chip production plant.

The southern metropolis will have to provide 2,000 to 3,000 such engineers for the facility, which is estimated to yield US$120 million to $150 million in annual revenue by then, according to the city’s plan for the development of the microchip industry.

But city colleges and universities can churn out only 100 skilled chip engineers a year, said Ngo Duc Hoang, general secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Semiconductor Industry Association.  

There is a strong demand for design and process engineers, Hoang said, adding the city is doing fine with the chip design part thanks to firm support from the local authorities.

But the economic hub is struggling with the training of process engineers due to insufficient facilities, he said.

In general the city is facing a shortage of human resources for the chip production industry as very few students have signed up for semiconductor engineering in college.

“They feel bored as they have to ‘imagine’ working on a chip, thanks to the absence of equipment,” Nguyen Thanh Sang, a lecturer at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Information Technology, said. “As far as my experience is concerned, they think of it as something unclear so very few go for it.”  

To cope with the situation, the Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Center, located in Thu Duc District, has cooperated with the universities under the Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City to provide professional training to electronics engineers to turn them into microchip designers.

Under this cooperation the engineers are sent to the Saigon Hi-Tech Park, located in District 9, for internships and then to foreign countries for further training for three to four months.

International chip experts should be invited to give classes in semiconductor technology in Vietnam so as to save costs, Dr Nguyen Ba Tuan, with state-owned Saigon Industry Corporation, which builds the chip production plant, suggested.