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Taiwan hits snags in cultivating high-level semiconductor talent

Daniel Nenni

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
Taiwan hits snags in cultivating high-level semiconductor talent.jpg


Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor talent show high cost-performance ratios, but the talent supply shortage is worsening as domestic universities are hitting snags in expanding student enrollment due partly to the lack of professors and partly to the decrease of doctoral students, according to academic sources.

The sources said Google and many other tech players, aware that Taiwanese semiconductor engineers are cheaper to hire, have moved to set up R&D and design centers in Taiwan and poached employees from MediaTek and TSMC with comparatively higher base pay. This has widened the talent crunch at the Taiwan semiconductor industry as many companies also require more talent to support their business expansions.

As such, semiconductor companies have had to urge the Ministry of Education to allow the polytechnic and electrical engineering departments at major universities to expand their student enrollments as much as possible.

But scholars said that Taiwan's high-level doctoral talent cultivation has encountered serious problems. For instance, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Taiwan University (NTUEE) has been unable to recruit new professors for several years. Although there are still sporadic resumes received, none of them meet the qualification requirements set by the NTUEE department.

The Ministry of Education wants electrical engineering departments and graduate schools of local universities to enroll more students to train talent for semiconductor and other high-tech industries, but it has not taken into consideration the shortage of professors, the scholars noted. Take the newly established Graduate School of Advanced Technology at NTU as an example. There are not many full-time professors, and the new graduate school has to share professors with NTUEE, they continued.

An NTUEE department professor admitted that a teacher has fixed available time, and there is also a limit in the number of students he can accept or otherwise the quality of students would be sacrificed. Furthermore, the professor lamented that it is unsustainable for professors to take this kind of drudgery without getting extra pay.

There are outside opinions that the government should loosen the restrictions so that people without a doctorate degree can become university professors, and that in order to encourage students to study for a doctorate, the government should increase the stipends of doctoral students, shorten the time for graduation, and reduce their workload of research projects.

In response, scholars noted that if this is actuslly done, it would be a collapse of Taiwan's overall academic research capabilities and Taiwan would henceforth withdraw from the international semiconductor competition arena,

Academic sources indicated that young students now have multiple sources of information, and the opinions of their peers can influence them much more than advice from their teachers, causing many professors to stop persuading students to study for PhDs. The sources lamented that with a severe shortage of doctoral talent, it is an almost impossible task to foster more semiconductor talent in Taiwan.

www.digitimes.com

Taiwan hits snags in cultivating high-level semiconductor talent

Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor talent show high cost-performance ratios, but the talent supply shortage is worsening as domestic universities are hitting snags in expanding student enrollment due partly to the lack of ptofessors and partly to the decrease of doctoral students, according to...
www.digitimes.com
 
So, they are facing the same probblem as US. More software design (social media) and less semiconductors. That's not really a problem in general but it may be a problem for Taiwan as they are unlikely to create competotors for the likes of Google and Facebook.
 
From my experience the majority of semiconductor talent have masters and PhDs from US schools. Is that no longer the case?
 
I feel like this is missing context. Chip companies don't compete a ton with TSMC on the manufacturing talent front. Although they without a doubt poach folks from the ecosystem and design parts of TSMC. EEs, PhDs, and trade school folks are also far from the only folks working at TSMC. I have no doubt there are hordes of BS and MS engineers and BS techs (many of them being chem, phys, mat sci/eng, ChE, and MechEs).

From my experience the majority of semiconductor talent have masters and PhDs from US schools. Is that no longer the case?
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I couldn't give you TSMC's exact ratio. But I know there are plenty of non PhD engineer positions. You can also see plenty of job postings across the industry that are accepting of MS/BS engineers. Although I suspect it would be pretty hard to get an engineering position at say fab12 with only a BS.
 
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nghanayem said:
I feel like this is missing context. Chip companies don't compete a ton with TSMC on the manufacturing talent front. Although they without a doubt poach folks from the ecosystem and design parts of TSMC. EEs, PhDs, and trade school folks are also far from the only folks working at TSMC. I have no doubt there are hordes of BS and MS engineers and BS techs (many of them being chem, phys, mat sci/eng, ChE, and MechEs).


I couldn't give you TSMC's exact ratio. But I know there are plenty of non PhD engineer positions. You can also see plenty of job postings across the industry that are accepting of MS/BS engineers. Although I suspect it would be pretty hard to get an engineering position at say fab12 with only a BS.
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That's not where the competition happens. The technical talent simply does not go into EE, material sciences etc. period. Nowadays everyone wants to be a data scientist or something like this. That's where the money is.
 
lilo777 said:
That's not where the competition happens. The technical talent simply does not go into EE, material sciences etc. period. Nowadays everyone wants to be a data scientist or something like this. That's where the money is.
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If there's enough of a shortage, the salary differences will work themselves out.
 
blueone said:
If there's enough of a shortage, the salary differences will work themselves out.
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It's possible but the trend has been in place for many years if not decades. Keep in mind that TSMC does not compete with, say, Google thus they might be OK with having inferior work force as long as they have better engineers than Samsung. In my experience, large semiconductor companies in US set salary ranges based on industry prevailing wages, i.e. they will pay their FAB workers as much as the FAB workers get paid elsewhere (in FABs) and they pay their software engineers as much as software engineers get paid in the industry (which is much lower than what the software engineers are earning for similar job in other industries like Facebook or Google). There are exceptions I suspect. For example, Nvidia right now probably is paying well for software talent but that's because they need to compete with software companies to some degree and they have high profit margins.
 
For student shortage, I believe there are two main issues: Firstly, the birth rate in Taiwan is steadily decreasing, which consequently creates shortages from elementary schools up to universities. It is not only the Electrical Engineering (EE) department that faces such an issue, but also other departments related to semiconductor engineering, such as Chemistry, are suffering from similar issues. Secondly, why study for a Ph.Ddegree if one can make considerably more money with a Master's or Bachelor's degree by joining companies such as Mediatek or TSMC.

Regarding professor shortage, the same aforementioned second point ($ issue) applies and, additionally, the salaries for teaching at public universities in Taiwan are extremely low. The average income for young professors is rarely higher than 40,000 US dollars per year, which is approximately equivalent to 80-120,000 if the same position was available in the Silicon Valley.

Additionally, the large tech firms in the US are quite appealing to EE students from Taiwan due to the high salaries they offer. Many pursue "degree washing" - the act of traveling to the US to obtain a Master's degree in CS and then using the OPT chance to get into FANG companies and acquire an H1B visa.
 
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The US also has an aging population problem. Out of four children I only have 2 grandchildren. I have 5 brothers and we spawned 13 children. My wife comes from an even bigger family. It is not just the cost of children, people are opting out for freedom. My children are still wondering how we did it and stayed happily married. A secret I will take to my early grave. :ROFLMAO:
 
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