In recent years, there has been a shortage of semiconductor talent in many industrially developed regions around the world, and relatively speaking, the talent situation in the United States, China and South Korea is the most urgent, but the causes and conditions of talent shortage in these three regions are very different.
The United States was originally a gathering place for semiconductor talents, but it focused on design, and due to the vigorous development of chip manufacturing in recent years, there was a sudden shortage of semiconductor manufacturing talents in the United States. China is another situation, there is a shortage of talents in all aspects of the semiconductor industry chain, especially manufacturing, and the shortage is serious.
South Korea is a semiconductor manufacturing powerhouse, there is no shortage of corresponding talents, but in recent years, the situation has taken a sharp turn for the worse, due to the crazy development of chip manufacturing in other parts of the world, the number of talents needed cannot be cultivated in the short term, and only people can be poached, at this time, South Korea has become the hardest hit area. Currently, there is a growing shortage of semiconductor talent in South Korea.
01
Samsung and SK hynix are the hardest hit areas
Not only chip manufacturing, in the past two years, AI servers have become popular all over the world, and this high-performance computing system has high requirements for processors and memory (DRAM), and compared with traditional data centers, AI systems require processors and memory to be more closely linked, and put forward higher requirements for the design, manufacturing and packaging technology and process of combining the two. Based on this, their employees have become the main target of AI chip and system manufacturers to poach people.
South Korea's Chosun Daily reported that according to LinkedIn (LinkedIn) as of June 18 this year, Nvidia has 515 new employees from Samsung Electronics, on the other hand, Samsung only 278 new employees from NVIDIA, if the total number of employees of the two companies is taken into account, it highlights the dilemma of Samsung's brain drain, the total number of Samsung Semiconductor employees is about 74,000, and the total number of NVIDIA employees is about 30,000, that is, only 0.4% of Samsung Semiconductor's employees are from NVIDIA, And 1.7% of Nvidia's employees are from Samsung.
However, Samsung successfully poached 1,138 people from Intel, more than the 848 people that Intel poached from Samsung. Recently, 195 TSMC employees jumped to Samsung, while only 24 Samsung employees jumped to TSMC during the same period.
Recently, 38 SK hynix employees switched jobs to NVIDIA, but the former did not succeed in poaching a single person from NVIDIA.
Although SK hynix is ahead of Samsung in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) manufacturing technology, it is at a disadvantage in this war for talent, in addition to being poached by Nvidia, 111 employees have also jumped to Micron, but only 8 people have been poached from Micron.
Overall, South Korea has a lot of semiconductor talent output and little input.
02
There is a growing sense of urgency in South Korea
According to the 2022 Semiconductor Industry Labor Market Report released by the Ministry of Education of South Korea, the country's semiconductor industry will face a labor gap of 56,000 people by 2031, and in 2022, the number will be 1,784, and the gap will widen 30-fold in 10 years.
Despite efforts by major South Korean semiconductor companies to strengthen security measures and rein in talent through non-compete agreements, attempts by foreign companies to recruit professionals and poach advanced technology from South Korean companies continue to increase and are difficult to contain, industry sources said.
An engineer at SK hynix, who worked at SK hynix in chip design for DRAM and HBM memory, joined Micron in July 2022 after retiring from the Korean company. Although he made an agreement with SK hynix not to work for a rival company for two years after his retirement, he went to Micron.
SK hynix filed a lawsuit against the engineer in August 2023, preventing him from working for a competitor. The local court ruled that the former employee could not work for Micron until the non-compete agreement stipulated and that he must pay SK hynix 10 million won ($7,637) a day if he violated the ruling.
However, it took about seven months for the court to make a decision, and in the highly competitive HBM market, SK hynix competed with Samsung and Micron for market dominance, and the gap in technology was only a few months.
"The engineers who joined Micron were key figures in HBM's development. Most of the technology leaks occur in the process of changing the guard, and although the law does not solve all the problems, it is necessary to emphasize that if semiconductor technology is leaked as a state industrial secret, it will be severely punished", said Lee Jong-hwan, a professor at the Department of Systems Semiconductor Engineering at Sanmyung University.
According to South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the number of cases involving cross-border leaks of industrial technology increased from 14 in 2019 to 23 in 2023, while chip-related cases increased from 3 to 15 during the same period. This highlights the severity of technology leaks in the semiconductor industry.
"Recruiting professionals from competing companies is the best way to quickly bridge the technology gap, and the government needs to work with companies to strengthen the management of these engineers," said Professor Lee Jong-hwan.
At present, the South Korean government is actively increasing penalties to prevent the leakage of national core technologies. Parliament introduced a bill to increase penalties, and in November 2023, the Commission on Trade, Industry and Energy approved an amendment to the Industrial Technology Protection Act, which strengthens the penalties for leaks of the country's core technologies.
Kim Dae-jong, a professor of business administration at Sejong University, said that Korean companies need to work to improve the treatment of engineers, and that companies should optimize the pay of core employees to increase job satisfaction and implement systems that can extend the life expectancy of their careers.
In South Korea, many foreign companies are also competing with local semiconductor companies such as Samsung and SK hynix for talent.
In June 2023, Lam Research, a U.S. semiconductor equipment company, held the "Lam Research Tech Academy" for juniors and seniors in South Korea. The company's goal in the program is to attract talent, and Lam Research has been increasing employee hiring since opening its R&D center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province in April 2022.
Lam's direct involvement in talent development stems from the increasing competition for talent among global semiconductor companies that have entered South Korea in recent years. As global semiconductor equipment companies increase their investment in South Korea and human resources are in short supply, major companies such as Applied Materials, ASML, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron (TEL) are all building or expanding R&D centers in South Korea, and ASML plans to double the size of its Korean branch in 10 years, which currently has about 2,000 employees.
In addition to the continuous robbery of talents, the situation of cultivating semiconductor talents in South Korea is not optimistic.
"The large number of students choosing to go to the medical sector is one of the many reasons for the semiconductor labor shortage", said a semiconductor industry insider, "It is rather strange that the semiconductor industry, which has a huge impact on the national economy, is not interested compared to the interest in medical schools in our society." "Being less popular than medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy, semiconductor programs have had to offer more scholarships and guarantee employment after graduation.
Kim, an 18-year-old student at a school in Seoul who considered taking a semiconductor course but eventually applied and was admitted to Korea University's School of Electrical Engineering, said, "Although I was interested in job security from Samsung Electronics or SK hynix, I hesitated because the program was developed to meet the needs of industrial manpower." It can be seen that young people are not very interested in the work of the wafer factory, and even some resistance.
03
The United States is trying its best to rob people
In 2023, the U.S. SIA released a report specifically analyzing the semiconductor talent shortage. By 2030, there will be about 115,000 more domestic semiconductor workers in the United States, about 345,000 related jobs in 2022, and 460,000 by the end of 2023, an increase of 33%. Based on the current completion rate of talent development in universities, it is estimated that about 67,000 of these new jobs will be at risk of becoming unavailable, which accounts for 58% of the estimated new jobs. Of the shortage, 39 percent will be skilled workers, 35 percent will be engineers with a four-year bachelor's degree, and 26 percent will be engineers at the master's or doctoral level.
At the end of 2023, TSMC said that due to the serious shortage of skilled workers, it is difficult to solve it in the United States in the short term, so the mass production of this fab, which was originally scheduled to be mass-produced in 2024, has been postponed to 2026.
Not only TSMC, but more and more semiconductor manufacturers are building semiconductor factories in Arizona or other states, and the problem of talent shortage is becoming more and more prominent.
The surge in hiring in the U.S. during the global chip shortage in 2021 and 2022 coincided with the U.S. government's passage of the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which encourages companies to invest in semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. Since the beginning of 2023, the shortage of mature process chips has been significantly alleviated, but the number of jobs in its manufacturing industry has not declined.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, median annual wages in semiconductor and other electronic components manufacturing exceed those in manufacturing as a whole and several other comparable industries, and the median wages for these jobs are nearly twice as high as in retail.
Looking ahead, recruitment for domestic semiconductor manufacturing talent in the U.S. will continue to be strong. The CHIPS and Science Act provides $39 billion for direct incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing investment, and federal incentives are designed to support investments across the semiconductor ecosystem. Since 2022, the industry has announced more than $200 billion for chip manufacturing, with investment categories including analog chips, cutting-edge logic chips, and semiconductor materials such as specialty chemicals and silicon wafers upstream of the value chain.
As U.S. federal funding flows to semiconductor manufacturers, the CHIPS and Science Act will drive more private sector investment, which will lead to a continued increase in advanced semiconductor manufacturing jobs.
In order to obtain and attract more semiconductor manufacturing talents from abroad, the United States is also considering amending its immigration laws.
The H-1B visa system is the main way for the U.S. semiconductor industry to bring in international talent, however, such company-sponsored visas are valid for 3 years and can be extended to 6 years, which is a challenge for workers from populous countries such as India and China due to the 7% cap on each country's visa quota, which is distributed through a lottery system.
After the visa expires, foreign employees are required to obtain a permanent residence green card, and while it is possible to stay indefinitely while waiting to obtain a green card through the I-140 petition, this situation leaves many skilled workers in a state of uncertainty, without the rights conferred by green cards or citizenship, and may prevent potential talent from considering the U.S. as a long-term career destination.
It can be seen that the H-1B visa system is not conducive to the introduction and retention of excellent semiconductor talents, so the U.S. chip industry has called on the government to revise the relevant system.
The U.S. Semiconductor Industry and Economic Innovation Group (EIG) has proposed a new type of visa specifically for the semiconductor industry – the Chip Manufacturer Visa. The proposal aims to provide a streamlined process for talent acquisition in specific industries.
If the U.S. government follows EIG's proposal, it will issue 2,500 visas per quarter, for a total of 10,000 per year.
One advantage of the chip manufacturer visa is that it can be renewed once, foreign workers can use it for 5 years and then renew it for another 5 years, and when those 10 years have passed, there may be more domestic talent available. EIG said the "longer deadline" gives U.S. semiconductor companies time to scale.
In the United States, a large percentage of engineering graduate students come from abroad, and once they graduate, it is not easy to stay in the United States due to visa issues, which can exacerbate the shortage of skilled workers in the industry.
To address these issues, H-1B visa holders need more time to find a job (they now have 60 days to find a job or leave) and make it easier for U.S. college graduates to stay and work.
In November 2023, Senators Hickenlooper and Cramer introduced the EAGLE bill, which would increase the visa cap from 7% to 15% per country and make other changes to allow more talent to enter the United States.
04
China needs semiconductor talent even more
In recent years, with the rapid development of China's integrated circuit industry, the talent team has continued to grow, from 400,000 in 2017 to 602,000 in 2022. However, junior personnel accounted for the largest proportion (44.41%), intermediate personnel accounted for 36.48%, senior personnel accounted for 16.01%, and special personnel accounted for 3.1%.
According to the survey, in 2020, there were about 541,000 semiconductor employees in Chinese mainland, and the demand scale in 2023 will be about 766,500, even if 30,000 college semiconductor-related graduates enter the industry every year, the talent gap is still more than 100,000.
The shortage of semiconductor talents in Chinese mainland is all-round, from semiconductor materials, equipment, EDA tools, and IP in the upstream of the industrial chain to chip design and manufacturing in the middle and lower reaches, there is a shortage of personnel, and the largest demand is in the chip manufacturing industry.
There are only two ways to obtain talents: self-cultivation and external poaching. Self-cultivation is a long-term measure, and it is difficult to achieve results in the short term, while high-salary poaching is the only choice to solve the immediate problem.
In recent years, Chinese mainland has been recruiting senior engineers and skilled workers from other countries and regions with high salaries.
However, high-salary poaching still can't completely solve the problem of semiconductor manufacturing, because it is a very complex system engineering, there are 400 processes in the general process alone, and a 12-inch wafer factory needs nearly 2,000 engineers at every turn, even if 50 engineers are poached from the world's most advanced wafer factory, it is already a terrible thing, but this is still a drop in the bucket for 2,000 engineers. Therefore, it is important to take effective measures to train local engineers and skilled workers for a long time.