Despite China's semiconductor industry aggressively carrying out diverse development projects, increasingly serious talent shortage is casting clouds over the development, making it a pressing issue for IC players in the country to introduce talent from abroad, especially amid the escalating US-China trade conflicts, according to industry sources.

The sources said many of the first-generation executives at China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), including founder Richard Chang and CEOs David Wang and Simon Yang, left the company to set up IDM or steer the development of DRAM or flash memory chips at other China semiconductor businesses.

As semiconductor investment projects are no longer concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, more and more mid- and high-ranking professionals are badly needed to handle management, operation and technology development at IC fabs at other Chinese cities.

Industry experts estimate that China's semiconductor industry will see a talent shortfall of up to 400,000 people by 2020, more than the existing total employment force in the industry.

Wang Zhihua, deputy dean of the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University, estimated that if China's semiconductor wants to realize the production value of CNY1 trillion (US$144.27 billion) by 2020, a total of 700,000 employees are needed to support the production if based on the per capita output value of CNY1.4 million a year, compared to the current workforce of only 300,000.

In Jiangsu province alone, the semiconductor talent shortfall is expected to exceed 100,000 by 2020, not to mention the shortfalls seen in new semiconductor bases including Wuhan, Chengdu and other cities in central and mid-western China.

Besides cultivation of local talent, the best way to address talent shortfalls is to enforce massive introduction from abroad. Huawei, for instance, has introduced at least 6,000 engineers from overseas, and SiEn (Qingdao) Integrated Circuits has sourced one third of its engineers from Taiwan.

By: DocMemory
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