Turn an academic edge into an industrial one

This shows the strong need to set up a national-level research institute.

LEE BYOUNG-HUNThe author is a professor of semiconductor engineering at Postech. After investing heavily in the semiconductor field, some Korean researchers are making noteworthy results. Competitive research is also promising. This has been reaffirmed at a recent conference.

The Symposium on “VLSI Technology & Circuits” hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) — one of the two major professional semiconductor associations — was held in Honolulu from June 16 to 20. The event was attended by 1,350 professionals, the largest number ever. Korea and the United States each presented 23 percent of the papers presented, followed by China at 14 percent, Taiwan at 12 percent and Japan at 8 percent.

In terms of the number of papers by field, you can guess what new field each country is focusing on. The number of papers China submitted in the design field was three times more than last year’s, and the number of papers in device processing more than doubled for China, Korea and the United States.

It would be even better if Korea’s top academic competitiveness was directly linked to its industrial competitiveness, but the current industry situation is regrettable. First of all, it is necessary to prevent an outstanding workforce from leaving the country due to a difference in compensation systems. Experts who wish to find jobs in America are rapidly increasing.

China is threatening the United States. China introduced a compensation system offering up to 30 times the average salary to attract high-quality talent overseas. By attracting outstanding talent from the U.S., China set the foundation to chase the country in the design field and founded leading companies. Korea also must introduce an unconventional compensation system for the key workforce to nurture star engineers and scientists.

Just as important as securing talent is the establishment of a national research institute in the chip sector. Korea’s competitors — such as Japan (LSTC), Taiwan (TSRI) and the United States (NSTC) — have each established a national research institute encompassing the industrial, academic and research sectors for joint development and sharing future technologies. They have also built international cooperative systems. But in Korea, different government ministries launch international cooperation projects on their own and compete to distribute research funds among themselves. This is why the country is begging for a chance to participate in joint research programs on core technologies with overseas partners. Korea must enhance its bargaining power through a national research institute, get its lacking technologies from competitors and help them with our strong merits in other fields.

At the conference, a proposal was made to reduce power consumption and increase computational efficiency through the convergence of software platforms and semiconductor technologies. But there seems to be a long way to go, as the proposal requires multiple companies to do the job. This shows the strong need to set up a national-level research institute. If this path must be taken, I propose Korean companies work together and pioneer a new path first.