HCM City authorities are seeking to promote micro electro mechanical systems technology, which plays an important role in the fabrication of sensors.

“The MEMS industry has tremendous potential and development opportunities in HCM City,” Nguyen Thanh Phong, chairman of the city People’s Committee, told the second annual MEMS Forum on Friday.

“The city plans to collaborate with domestic and foreign businesses for investment and technology transfer, especially in design, manufacturing, packaging, testing and commercialisation of MEMS products.”

Ng Kai Fai, president of SEMI Southeast Asia, called for promoting the industry in Viet Nam: “Viet Nam should think about the supporting industry for MEMS because building a MEMS plant will require a huge amount of money.

“The government should focus on the local market and fund competitive projects. Investing in human resources is needed.

“The Government should promote co-operation with overseas partners [since] knowledge and technology transfer are very important.

“The country has encouraged foreign enterprises to invest, but it is time for the Government to push local enterprises to create a supply chain for foreign enterprises in the MEMS sector.”

Pham Xuan Da, head of the Ministry of Science and Technology office in HCM City, said: “The ministry is creating a support framework for MEMS.”

Than Trong Phuc of VinaCapital suggested the Government should focus on the application of MEMS and IoT to solve practical problems.

“If we have specific applications and a market, we can attract investors.”

MEMS technology plays an important role in the fabrication of sensors, which are a key element of IoT. It creates the foundation for making intelligent products on a mass scale with compact sizes, energy efficiency and reliability.

The second forum, with the theme “grab the trend, nurture creations”, sought to continue the task of building an MEMS eco-system in the city.

It was attended by many well-known experts from Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Spain, and Australia.

It offered suggestions for policies for building the MEMS industry eco-system, developing quality human resources for the industry, commercialising MEMS products from R&D efforts, and involving venture capitals in the development of the eco-system.

Delegates said the MEMS market is large.

In 2016 there were 16 billion MEMS products and the industry is expected to achieve turnover of US$20 billion by 2020, they said.

The MEMS/sensors market is now driven by automotive applications, but is expanding to new industries like smart homes, smart buildings, healthcare, office and factory management, and environment control, according to experts.

However, there are also some challenges. The industry needs to adapt its cost structure, especially for packaging, and needs a complete functional or module approach to help the integrator use the MEMS device. — VNS