With the accelerated development of a new round of global scientific and technological revolution and industrial revolution, the new generation of information technology industry represented by integrated circuits has become the core driving force. Among them, talents have become the first resource for the development of the integrated circuit industry, which is not only the first driving force for consolidating the development of the industry, but also the inexhaustible source of promoting the upgrading of industrial circulation.
Today, the semiconductor industry is experiencing a cycle of imbalance between supply and demand.
Since 2020, the outbreak of the new crown epidemic has brought a huge impact on the fundamentals of the global semiconductor industry, which in turn has triggered a new round of global core shortage under the knock-on effect, and most semiconductor companies in 2021 are firmly focused on the future and choose expansion strategies. According to KPMG' survey, 68% of the companies surveyed use expansion strategies as their current development strategies to cope with future industry and market growth.
Therefore, driven by market demand and industry trends, enterprises have successively increased investment in research and development and entered the stage of "barbaric growth". However, the rapid expansion has also exposed the problems and hidden dangers, the growth rate of semiconductor talents has not caught up with the market expansion rate, and the shortage of talents has gradually become the most important problem facing the chip industry.
Talent shortages have become a global problem
Not long ago, Grofond claimed that the IC industry may face a tight supply situation in the next 5-10 years, and the company's wafer production capacity by the end of 2023 has been booked.
TSMC can not stop the surging orders, in order to ensure the supply of goods, many manufacturers are competing for TSMC's production capacity, Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, Intel and other dozens of customers have paid funds to TSMC in advance. TSMC expects to make an advance payment of NT$150 billion in 2022.
In the face of today's lack of cores and insufficient production capacity, global chip manufacturers are frantically building factories and expanding production to fill the "holes" in the lack of cores.
According to SEMI data, there are 62 semiconductor fabs in production worldwide from 2017 to 2020, of which 26 are located in Chinese mainland, and the construction of 29 fabs will be started in the past two years (19 new in 2021 and 10 in 2022), and the mainland accounts for 8 of them.
Number of new foundries in 2021/2022 in all regions of the world
(Source: SEMI, Minsheng Securities Research Institute)
In addition, according to the figures released by the Semiconductor Association, the global procurement of semiconductor production equipment will exceed $100 billion for the first time in 2021, which also confirms the expansion progress and scale of fabs.
However, the construction of a new plant is not to buy equipment to do everything, the difficulty lies in the construction of the talent team. Although in the chip manufacturing line, most of the use of automation equipment, but these equipment still need skilled staff to operate, therefore, the large-scale expansion of wafer production line will trigger a strong demand for integrated circuit talents, making the shortage of industry talents more and more prominent.
Ann Kelleher, Intel's previous executive vice president of semiconductor manufacturing, also pointed out that a fab must have thousands of skilled engineers to operate the equipment and produce it. In addition, high-level engineering and technical personnel are required to further develop new materials and production technologies so that the performance of semiconductors can be further advanced.
There are also examples in China, in 2018, Shanghai Huahong integrated circuit R & D and manufacturing base started construction in Wuxi, Shanghai Huahong Hongli executive vice president Xu Wei once revealed that Huahong alone this project needs 5,000 semiconductor talents.
Therefore, after the current expansion plans announced by TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and other semiconductor manufacturers, the shortage of technical talents related to semiconductor manufacturing has become the key to the concern of the entire industry.
In addition to building new fabs, the number of domestic chip-related enterprises has also shown explosive growth in recent years.
According to the statistics of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, since 2016, the number of Chinese mainland IC design companies has increased significantly, from 736 in 2015 to 1362 in 2016, and as of 2021, this number has grown to 2810, an increase of 592 compared with 2218 in 2020, an increase of 26.7%.
In the stage of investment and construction and the continuous rise of start-ups, the related talent demand is constantly being released, resulting in an aggravated talent gap.
The author mentioned in a previous article "Lack of people, our front desk has transferred territory" that in 2020, the scale of employees in the mainland integrated circuit industry was 541,000, an increase of 5.7% year-on-year. It is estimated that by around 2023, the scale of talent demand in the whole industry will reach about 766,500 people, and the talent gap will exceed 200,000. The trend of "front-end and mid-end heavy" in the structural design industry and manufacturing industry and "light back-end" in the packaging and testing industry has gradually taken shape.
In 2021, the "2021 Q1 "Core Power" (INTEGRATED Circuit/Semiconductor) Market Supply and Demand Report released by 511 shows that the recruitment volume of the integrated circuit/semiconductor industry in the first quarter of 2021 increased by 65.3% compared with the same period in 2020, and the demand for talents in the integrated circuit/semiconductor industry accounted for 5.5% of the total number of positions in March 2021, reaching a record high.
Coincidentally, the semiconductor industry in Taiwan has the same problem.
It is understood that TSMC will expand the recruitment of 9,000 employees in 2021, and with the future evolution of advanced process processes and the construction of new factories in the United States, Japan and other countries, recruitment demand is expected to continue to grow; UMC's new capacity in Nanke is entering the stage of new plants, and it is expected that it will open up production capacity in stages before 2023, so in 2022, UMC will recruit 1500-2000 new employees, and will carry out structural salary adjustments; MediaTek in addition to targeting university master's and doctoral students graduating in 2022, It has begun to recruit qualified semiconductor talents extensively, and it is expected to recruit more than 2,000 people.
According to the 2021 "Semiconductor Industry and Talent White Paper" released by Taiwan, the recruitment gap in Taiwan is at the highest level in more than six years. Semiconductor upstream, middle and downstream are short of engineers related to the process, the gap is as high as 15,000 per month, has surpassed the front-line packaging operators. Moreover, through the relevant trends and the development of the industry, it can be seen that the gap in semiconductor talents in Taiwan is gradually expanding.
Of course, not only Chinese mainland and Taiwan, the widening talent gap is a global problem.
As early as 2018, there were reports that thousands of semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the United States were not being met. The labor market is still very tight, with 80 percent of manufacturers saying it's hard to find qualified workers.
According to a report Eightfold.ai talent management firm, the United States alone will need to add about 70,000-90,000 workers from 2020 levels by 2025 to meet the most critical labor needs for expected fab expansion. According to the study, some members of Congress have urged more ambitious expansion to make the U.S. independent of foreign supplies, which would increase that number to 300,000 workers.
In May 2021, the South Korean government held the "K-Semiconductor Strategy Report Conference" at the Samsung Pyeongtaek plant, announcing that it will invest 510 trillion won (about 2.9 trillion yuan) in the next 10 years in the "K Semiconductor Strategy", aiming to establish an efficient industrial cluster integrating semiconductor production, raw materials, components, equipment and cutting-edge equipment, and design, with the goal of building the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing base by 2030. It is proposed to increase the annual export value of semiconductors to 200 billion US dollars by 2030 and increase the number of related jobs to 270,000.
At the same time, combined with Intel, Samsung, SK Hynix and other companies continue to increase investment and expansion, the demand for talents or will reach a new level.
Jim Koonmen, executive vice president of ASML, said asML's employee demand is expected to increase by 10 percent or more annually over the coming period to meet the booming demand for its tools driven by the proliferation of new chip factories around the world.
Find a good medicine for the "talent shortage"
In order to solve the problem of insufficient professional talents in the semiconductor field, the South Korean government proposed a semiconductor talent training plan. "Through cooperation with companies, we will set up specialized disciplines in colleges and universities to cultivate the talents we need."
In order to attract employees, ASML is intensifying its competition in several areas, including strengthening its recruitment capabilities. Koonmen said the company is adjusting its search for the right talent and deepening ties with universities to produce graduates who need people with everything from optics to software skills as well as electrical engineering skills.
In May last year, Taiwan passed a decree promoting innovation and education in high-tech industries such as semiconductors, prompting several universities in Taiwan to partner with companies such as TSMC to open specialized semiconductor academies to nurture talent. In this regard, TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin has publicly stated that he believes that industry-academia cooperation can lay the foundation for the next 10 years of Taiwan's semiconductor industry, and hopes to attract overseas experts and increase talent flow.
It can be seen that there is an urgent shortage of chip talents, and the industry urgently needs universities or cooperation with universities to make up for the talent gap.
In addition, some countries are addressing labour shortages through the allocation of funds. Chipmakers, for example, invest billions of dollars in universities. The EU is addressing the shortage by subsidizing regional chipmakers. The U.S. passed a bill that includes $5.22 billion worth of STEM scholarships, an $8.43 billion STEM workforce program, and $9.57 for university technology centers and innovation institutions.
However, spending more money alone will not fundamentally and holistically solve the talent shortage, at least not in the short term.
As part of the promotion of self-sufficiency in advanced technologies such as chips and semiconductor industries, Chinese mainland has opened special semiconductor research schools and training centers from 2020, and many universities have also announced the establishment of integrated circuit colleges.
According to incomplete statistics, since 2021 alone, more than 13 universities, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, etc., have established integrated circuit colleges and research institutes.
In 2021, the opening of domestic integrated circuit colleges and research institutes
(Semiconductor Industry Observation Drafting)
Colleges and universities are an important channel for talent training and transportation, and integrated circuit talents are no exception, but there is still a big gap between the number of training and industrial needs, and the quality of training is rapidly improving, but there is still room for growth. Therefore, it is not overnight to make up for the talent gap of hundreds of thousands and cultivate a group of outstanding talents.
According to official data surveys, in 2021, among the 28 demonstration microelectronics colleges majoring in microelectronics and integrated circuits, there are less than 1,000 graduates in the real design direction. Moreover, in the design work, it is also divided into digital front-end, digital verification, digital back-end, DFT, analog design, analog layout and other directions, and there are few students who can match in a single direction.
Kou Xufeng, assistant dean of the School of Information Science and Technology of ShanghaiTech University, said that the names of integrated circuit/microelectronic disciplines in various universities are different, the discipline barriers are high, and there are large cognitive differences between schools and enterprises, as well as differences between knowledge and practice. The students trained are disconnected from the operation of the enterprise, and they also need to go through a long period of training of the enterprise to officially get started. Therefore, how to build the last "one kilometer" of school-enterprise integration has become an important factor in the current talent development.
In this regard, in addition to the unilateral cultivation of industry talents by colleges and universities, it is also an effective way to promote the cultivation of talents and ecological construction through diversified methods such as institutional education and training, as well as the integration of industry and education.
Taking Moore's elite talent cloud business as an example, its online education leading brand "E Lesson Network" benchmarks the development of the industry and provides lifelong learning and employment services. With a complete theoretical and practical course system, guided by the needs of enterprise positions, through the independent research and development of the industry-level environmental training platform, a large number of enterprises have deeply cultivated integrated circuit engineering professionals who meet the requirements of the post. At present, more than 280 enterprises have cooperated with the "E Lesson Network" and successfully hired students, and from October 2020 to October 2021 alone, 1526 trainees have been successfully trained to work in enterprises.
At the same time, the "E Lesson Network" comprehensively assists the recruitment of enterprise talents, as well as the professional ability improvement and continuing education of incumbents, and empowers enterprises in an all-round way through a variety of service types such as junior engineer transportation/targeted training, new employee induction training, enterprise customized courses and enterprise online super VIP. At present, it has successfully cooperated with many well-known enterprises in the industry and achieved good results.
In addition, Moore elites strive to build and serve the talent training channel of colleges and universities, and actively cooperate with universities to cultivate and implement the integrated circuit industry-education integration model through the co-construction of on-campus practical training courses, joint training, discipline co-construction, joint laboratory co-construction, teacher training classes, joint training of professional masters, and joint construction of internship training bases inside and outside the university.
Recently, Moore Elite released the independently developed integrated platform for teaching and scientific research of integrated circuit professional training - "Moore Training Cloud", and has now carried out in-depth cooperation with many universities. With the help of this one-stop chip design and supply chain service platform and education and training platform, universities can connect more directly and strongly with the integrated circuit industry, improve the richness of teaching and industry matching, further enhance the scientific research ability of the industry, and improve the cognitive level and practical ability of students on integrated circuits. The rich scientific research resources of universities can also help Moore elites improve their engineering and technical capabilities in serving integrated circuit enterprises, jointly develop equipment technology and project research, and cultivate more integrated circuit professional and technical personnel.
On the whole, in the current industry background and environment, under the trend of lack of talent resources and talent training dilemma in the integrated circuit industry, Moore Elite Talent Cloud is committed to creating a closed loop for the semiconductor industry to cultivate integrated circuit talents, serve the national integrated circuit industry development strategy, focus on teaching and scientific research as one, and help the training of integrated circuit professionals.
Write at the end
In the face of the current trend of industry development, the talent gap problem is more like a long-term pain, which is difficult to make up in the short term.
All walks of life in the industry should pay attention to diversified training and ecological construction methods, in addition to increasing the training efforts of universities themselves, the multi-faceted assistance of enterprise training institutions and education service platforms may also be an important force.
Multi-pronged approach will be a good medicine to solve the "talent shortage".
*Disclaimer: This article is original by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion, semiconductor industry observation reprint is only to convey a different point of view, does not mean that semiconductor industry observation endorses or supports the view, if there is any objection, welcome to contact semiconductor industry observation.
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