High costs, businesses find it difficult to go alone
In the context of increasingly fierce global technology competition, semiconductors have become the foundation of many strategic fields such as AI, cloud computing, 5G, electric vehicles and defense.
According to Mr. Tran Dang Hoa, Chairman of FPT IS (FPT Corporation), for Vietnamese businesses to go deeper into this field, preferential policies need to be concretized by mechanisms suitable to reality.
The major difficulty currently is that research and testing infrastructure requires large costs; equipment import procedures are still lengthy, affecting project progress. In addition, determining domestic added value to grant "Make in Vietnam" certification for chip products still faces many obstacles due to the supply chain stretching across many countries.
According to the Chairman of FPT IS, the semiconductor industry needs a "green channel" mechanism for specialized equipment, and soon have more specific guidance on criteria for determining product origin so that businesses can easily access preferential policies.
Common infrastructure is the key to opening up a semiconductor ecosystem
According to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Cao Vinh - Deputy Director of VNU-HCM, many domestic research groups still have to find foreign partners to test chip manufacturing, leading to high costs, prolonged time and dependence on individual cooperation.
Each unit's self-investment in design tools, testing infrastructure and laboratories also disperses resources, making the commercialization of research results slower than market demand.
According to Mr. Vinh, this is the biggest bottleneck of Vietnam's semiconductor industry today. Because from a design idea to creating a complete chip is a complex value chain, including design, EDA tools, core IP, tape-out, packaging, testing, error analysis and finally putting the product into practical application. Without just one link, the entire process can stop right from the initial stage.
Ms. Nguyen Thi Bich Yen - Chairwoman and founder of VSAP Lab - believes that Vietnam needs to change its approach, from individual development to building a linked ecosystem where universities, research institutes, businesses and technology partners share infrastructure, tools and experience.
According to Ms. Yen, expensive resources such as design software, clean room, packaging and testing systems need to be exploited according to a common model to reduce initial investment costs, while creating opportunities for startups and research groups to access industrial standards from the first steps.
Another issue she particularly emphasized is that Vietnam should not spread resources across too many development directions. Instead, it is necessary to choose fields that are suitable for its current capacity and domestic market needs.
Experts believe that Vietnam can choose a more feasible direction in semiconductors such as AI chip for Vietnamese language processing, secure IoT chip, advanced packaging technology and chiplet, instead of directly competing at the highest technology buttons.
The global semiconductor industry is also shifting from a miniature transistor mindset to optimizing system architecture, connectivity and packaging technology, opening up opportunities for later countries to participate more deeply in functional chip design, chiplet and testing and packaging stages.
Experts all agree that no country is successful in the field of semiconductors only by the efforts of a business or a university. Success only comes when the entire ecosystem operates together as a unified entity, where resources are shared, research is linked to the market and businesses become the center of the innovation process.
That is also a condition for Vietnam not only to design chips for the world but also to gradually form technology products bearing the imprint of Vietnamese intelligence.
