It’s now the right time for Vietnam to set up a detailed roadmap for the development of the semiconducting industry.
 |
| ICDREC’s leaders meet Deputy Prime Minister (second from left) |
“Vietnam has been making the electronics assembling for more than 30 years, the thing that South Korea could finish after 5-6 years in 1960s. Is it now the right time for us to take off? This is the question that Professor Dr of Science Dang Luong Mo, now the advisor to the HCM City National University, who was once the researcher of the Toshiba Central Research Institute, always raises when making his scientific presentations about Vietnam’s semiconducting-IC industry.
The professor has asserted that it is now the right time for Vietnam to draw up a detailed plan for the development of the non-smoke industry. It is now necessary to point out which chips Vietnam needs to manufacture, how it needs to organize the production and how to train workers for the industry.
The Saigon Industry Corporation has become the first Vietnamese enterprise which announced the investment of 200 million dollars on the factory that makes electronic chips in Vietnam.
Mo said that it is really very difficult to carry out a revolution in industries, especially in big industries such as semiconducting. The professor recalled the first days when he and colleagues began setting up the Vietnam National University Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Center (IDCREC) in Thu Duc district in HCM City. At that moment, ICDREC was just a work with three “no’s” – no worker, no money and no-thing.
“The 10 students who just graduated from universities, came to the center with their youth, enthusiasm and the willingness to make contributions to the building of the IC technology to work. However, as the job did not bring the sums of money big enough to live, only one of them can hold out until now,” Mo said.
The biggest problem for the center was that the instruments for IC designing were too expensive. At that time, Synopsys, the world’s biggest supplier of tools for IC designing came to Vietnam to offer to sell tools at big discounts: 350,000 dollars per set of tools instead of 500,000 dollars. However, this was a big sum of money unaffordable for ICDREC.
The representatives of Synopsys, who, at the meetings with Mo later, offered to decrease the sale prices further, but they only received the “no” answer from Mo.
Later, Mo retailed a true story in Japan to the representative from Synopsys. Before the first mainframes, which were priced from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, appeared in the world, a university in Tokyo invited for the bid on supplying equipments. And a nice surprise occurred: NEC won the bid when offering the price of one Japanese yen.
After listening to the story related by Mo, the Synopsis’ Director in charge of South East Asia, told him: “I understand you. I agree to provide tools free for one year. If you succeed, please buy our tools and don’t buy from other sources.”
And during the “one year grace period”, ICDREC successfully designed the first Vietnamese chip - SIGMAK3, the 8-bit chip which has put Vietnam into the world’s IC map.
Will a Vietnam-made-chip “go abroad”? Citing the story of South Korea, the country which started with the civil and outsourcing industries and unexpectedly listed its name in the list of the world’s leading IC countries in 1988, with the appearance of Samsung, Professor Mo said that it is really good for Vietnam that it now can manufacture chips, which should be seen as the foundation of any industries, because Vietnam now can master the technologies.
However, Vietnam should not think of exporting chips right now. Vietnam made chips should be churned out, first of all, to serve the domestic demand.
Mo also said that foreign automobile or phone manufacturers always set up their production lines based on some certain technologies. Therefore, it is not very likely that they would change the production lines, the thing which is very costly.
(Source: TBKTVN)
