Nguyen Thanh Tuyen, deputy head of the Authority for Information and Communications Technology Industry (AICT), said cooperation in semiconductor microchips is a highlight in the Vietnam-US Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

On September 17-23, while escorting Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh during his visit to the US, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung, together with Vietnamese technology groups had working sessions and signed MOUs with American leading technology corporations, such as Synopsys, Marvell and Qualcomm, to develop the semiconductor microchip industry in Vietnam.

These are all world leading technology firms in the semiconductor industry, with important positions in the global semiconductor chain. The cooperation will focus on establishing semiconductors research bases; helping promote the development of the semiconductor industry in Vietnam in a rapid and sustainable way; and giving advice in building a program on training a core chip designing workforce for Vietnam and supporting the startup community.

Marvel and Qualcomm said they were planning to increase the number of employees, build training programs under which scholarships are granted to students, and organize in-depth training courses, in order to promote an innovation ecosystem in Vietnam.

Tuyen said the semiconductor industry development strategy needs serious investments from the government, and policies to attract leading technology firms.

Regarding the preparation of the workforce for the semiconductor industry, AICT said Vietnam has universities and vocational schools that give training in ICT majors, which comprises 168 universities and 520 junior colleges and intermediate schools. Every year, the schools enroll 76,000 students for training in ICT and electronics-communications. This is the technology major with the highest enrollment quota in Vietnam.

“Vietnam’s high-quality human resources in semiconductor microchips are mostly in chip designing. A community of 30 businesses and 5,000 designing engineers has taken shape, which is a large community in the region,” he said.

Viettel and FPT Semiconductor are the two largest Vietnamese firms in the community, with 200 workers. In addition, there are 50 foreign companies from Japan, the US, China and South Korea which have invested in Vietnam, employing 5,000 engineers who can undertake all the work in the designing phase. 

Most of the workers live in HCM ity (85 percent), while the others are in Hanoi (8 percent) and Da Nang (7 percent).

Vietnam is building a semiconductor microchip strategy which will provide solutions to increase the number and improve the quality of the workforce for the important industry in the future.

Trong Dat