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Author |Maruto Mountain.
Edit |Wang Yipeng.
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Vietnam's semiconductor industry may never have been in the world's attention as it is today.
According to Bloomberg, on December 11, local time, Huang Jenxun discussed cooperation agreements in the semiconductor field with Vietnamese technology companies and **The former said that it will invest 2US$500 million for the construction of a chip center in Vietnam.
Huang's trip to Southeast Asia can be described as "rain and dew". During his visit to Singapore, Huang revealed that Nvidia is working with the country** to create a large language model trained in 11 languagesIn Malaysia, Huang said he would work with local companies to build AI data centers.
In fact, Vietnam's semiconductor industry is weaker than Singapore and Malaysia, but it may take over NVIDIA's only R&D center in Southeast Asia in the future.
However, even with the help of Nvidia, it may be difficult for Vietnam to occupy a central position in the global semiconductor industry, which has a highly defined division of labor.
Vietnam is already a "second home".
Nvidia's bet on Vietnam is not an isolated incident.
In September this year, during Biden's visit, the two countries** announced a number of agreements on semiconductors and rare earth minerals. Around the same time, Synopsys, a major EDA manufacturer, announced that it would open a semiconductor design and incubation center in partnership with the Saigon Hi-Tech ParkChip designer Marvell has also announced that it will upgrade its subsidiary in Ho Chi Minh City to a "global research and development center."
Marvell awards scholarships to students at the inauguration of its R&D center, Vietnam News
The increase of EDA and Marvell has allowed Vietnam to see the possibility of transforming the semiconductor industry chain to the design side, in the past two decadesThe country's semiconductor industry has long been stagnant in the packaging and testing process, and there is neither a wafer foundry nor a high-level design company.
According to the statistics of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), at present, in the global semiconductor industry, the packaging link accounts for only 6% of the total value of chips, far lower than the design (53%) and foundry (24%).
But just as Vietnam** was preparing to express its ambitions, Intel poured cold water on it.
At the beginning of November, Intel decided to suspend the expansion plan of the factory in Vietnam, according to the previous plan, Intel will invest $1 billion for the expansion of the production capacity of the Ho Chi Minh City packaging and testing factory, if the plan goes well, the factory will become Intel's largest packaging and testing factory in the world after the capacity expansion.
According to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, the reason for the abandonment of the investment was "stable power** and serious bureaucratic concerns" from Intel's top management.
Intel's statement has aroused the alarm of Vietnam**, announcing that it will soon introduce greater tax breaks and land leasing policies. After all, in the early years, after Intel signed a cooperation agreement with India for a wafer foundry, it turned around and set the location of the new factory in Dalian, China, which led to the termination of the inspection by STMicroelectronics and other companies.
And Huang's statement this time allowed Vietnam** to temporarily put aside its concerns.
According to the Vietnam News Agency, at a conference on semiconductors and artificial intelligence held by the Ministry of Planning and Investment of Vietnam,Huang said Nvidia wants to make Vietnam a "second home" for the company and will set up a legal entity in Vietnam to improve the local AI infrastructure and human skills.
Huang visited Vietnam's military electronics and telecommunications company, Bloomberg
Although Huang has high expectations for Vietnam, Nvidia's development in Vietnam may be even more difficult than Intel's.
As a fabless manufacturer (fabless), Nvidia is not involved in wafer foundry, as well as packaging and testingThe "chip center" with an investment of 500 million US dollars can basically be determined to only serve as a R&D function.
But the problem is that there is a serious shortage of chip engineers in Vietnam.
Vu Tu Thanh, head of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council's Vietnam office, said in an interviewAt present, there are only 5,000-6,000 trained chip engineers in Vietnam, and the demand for chip engineers in Vietnam in the next five years is about 50,000.
Business Insider has also previously reported that there are a large number of key job vacancies in Vietnam's semiconductor industry. If Vietnam's investment in the semiconductor industry surges in the coming years, this mismatch between talent and industry development is likely to become increasingly serious.
A senior semiconductor practitioner told Tiger Sniff,"Whether it is wafer foundry or chip design, there are strong know-how attributes, and a qualified chip engineer must go through at least 5-8 years of training after graduation to fully master professional skills. ”
Vietnam currently does not have a wafer foundry, advanced chip design is in its infancy, and more importantly, Hanoi University of Science and Technology is the only university in the country that can be responsible for the professional training of microelectronics.
Will it be a threat to China?
In Asia, the shift of labor-intensive industries to Southeast Asia has become an inevitable trend, but given the high threshold of the semiconductor industry, it may be difficult to make substantial progress in a short period of time.
A foundry executive told Tiger Sniff that while some foreign companies have chosen to relocate their R&D centers from China to Vietnam (e.g., Marvell) due to geopolitical influences, the talent gap on the table will not turn this behavior into a trendIn terms of wafer foundry, even the investment in 12-inch wafer production lines with mature processes generally exceeds 10 billion yuan, and considering Vietnam's relatively backward infrastructure construction level, foreign capital is unlikely to take this risk.
Especially in terms of upstream and downstream industry synergy, Vietnam does not have the conditions for wafer foundry. "Taking materials as an example, in wafer production, in addition to the core monocrystalline silicon materials, more than 200 kinds of auxiliary materials including various chemical reagents, precious metals, and special gases are also needed. With the exception of a few import-dependent industries such as hydrogen bromide, most of them have domestic alternatives, but Vietnam has almost no industrial chain in this area. ”
However, the executive saidConsidering that so many foreign semiconductor giants threw olive branches to Vietnam in the second half of this year, it is also a warning signal for some domestic practitioners.
Vietnam's core strength lies in the abundance of cheap labor with basic education, which is needed in the chip assembly and testing process.
I don't quite understand why Intel's packaging and testing plant has high requirements for electricity, in fact, the packaging and testing process can solve the problem of power outages through flexible production. The fab executive pointed out that unlike the power outage of the wafer foundry, which may lead to the scrapping of entire batches of products, the infrastructure requirements of the packaging and testing plant for backward areas are not high, and the technical threshold is relatively low.
In terms of labor costs, the wage level of Vietnam's packaging and testing factories is only about one-third of that in China.
In fact, although Intel has suspended its investment in Vietnam's packaging and testing plant, the old packaging and testing giant Amkor has long chosen to bet heavily on Vietnam. Previously, the company spent 16 to build its largest packaging and testing plant in Bac Ninh province, Vietnam, and it is directly positioned for advanced system-in-package.
The packaging and testing giant Amkor spent $1.6 billion to build a packaging and testing factory, **Viglacera
Some industry insiders pointed out that considering the current hot demand for Nvidia A100 H100 GPU, TSMC's COWOS advanced packaging capacity is actually in short supply.
For China, the packaging and testing industry provides a huge number of jobs and economic benefits. According to the statistics of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, the number of employees in the domestic semiconductor packaging and testing industry will reach 140,000 in 2022, and the market size will reach 298.5 billion yuan.
Data**: China Semiconductor Industry Association
Considering that the packaging and testing industry is a typical labor-intensive industry, if foreign investment continues to increase in Vietnam, it may have a certain impact on the domestic packaging and testing end.
However, in any case, at least in the foreseeable 5-10 years, Vietnam has not shown the potential to transition from the packaging and testing side to the design and manufacturing side in any dimension. Therefore, the statement about the "second hometown" of the Yellow Sect Leader may be more based on some kind of political statement.
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