Intel first invested in the semiconductor chip industry in Vietnam when it announced the $300 million project in January 2006, planning to set up a testing and chip assembling factory at the HCM City Hi-tech Park.

In November of the same year, Intel expanded the factory’s area from 14,000 sq m to 46,000 sq m and raised its investment capital to $1 billion.

In March 2007, the construction of the factory began with the campus including one office building, one building for public services, a warehouse containing raw materials and finished products, an electricity distribution station, a chemicals depot, one chip assembling and testing center.

In mid-2010, the factory began manufacturing Intel’s latest mobile chipsets used for laptops and mobile devices. It is likely to manufacture microprocessors in the future.

On October 29, 2012, the chip assembling and testing factory in Vietnam, the largest of Intel’s network, was officially inaugurated. To prepare for the inauguration of the factory, more than 150 workers of Intel Vietnam, including engineers and technicians, were sent to Malaysia, China and the US for training for two years.

After 17 years of operation, the number of workers at Intel’s chip factory has risen to 4,000. Kim Huat Ooi, CEO of Intel Products Vietnam, said the factory in Vietnam makes Raptor Lake, the 13th-generation microprocessor, and Meteor Lake, the next-generation microprocessor. It is estimated that 50 percent of Intel Global’s assembling and testing output is undertaken in Vietnam.

Intel remains the only US company to set up a chip manufacturing factory in Vietnam. However, other big names are expected to turn up in Vietnam soon, including Synopsys, Marvell and Ampere.

Synopsys is the No 1 company providing intellectual property tools in chip design and manufacturing. Now it is actively supporting the training of chip design human resources for Vietnam. 

On August 26, 2022, Synopsys and the HCM City Hi-tech Park (SHTP) Management Board signed a cooperation agreement on establishing SHTP Chip Design Center (SCDC), under which Synopsys will give 30 Synopsys licenses for three years, worth tens of millions of dollars to serve chip design training.

In October 2022, SCDC became operational and has provided initial services, including providing licenses for Synopsys design software products via virtual private network (VPN) to schools in HCM City National University; and collaborates with Synopsys to organize ToT (training of trainers) on IC design.

Marvell Technology has been in Vietnam since October 2013. The group specializes in designing chips and outsources to factories. There are two important business fields Marvell focuses on – cloud datacenter and AI. 

Marvell Vietnam now has two offices, in Etown of Tan Binh district and Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone (EPZ) in district 7, using 300 engineers majoring in product designing.

On May 16, 2023, Marvell established a chip design center in HCM City, which, according to Marvell's Vice President, will be the place to research and develop the most advanced microchip technologies.

To prepare human resources for the microchip design center, Marvell will help develop essential technological skills through Marvell Vietnam excellent scholarship program. It will give support to talented students majoring in computing science at Vietnam universities.

Meanwhile, Ampere Computing Vietnam, established in 2008, is an edge and cloud computing company, now focusing on developing new semiconductors designs and building the first software ecosystem for Arm-based server processors.

Recently, at the launch of the Electronics and Semiconductor Circuit (ESC) Training Center held at the HCM City Hi-tech Park, Synopsys’ Trinh Thanh Lam said Vietnam is doing well in the field of chip design and it has abundant human resources to develop the industry. Therefore, many chip companies in the US, Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan (China) have invested in Vietnam.

In terms of microchip design, Vietnam has about 5,000 engineers who can undertake work in all stages of the design process. The workforce for semiconductors is mostly in HCM City (85 percent), Hanoi (8 percent) and Da Nang (7 percent).

Vietnam’s microchip design engineers are mostly working for foreign companies from Japan, the US, China and South Korea. Meanwhile, Viettel Hi-Tech and FPT Semiconductor with 200 workers are the best-known Vietnamese manufacturers.

Le My