Ho Chi Minh City is looking for talent to design ICs for smart cities

The information was shared by Mr. Le Quoc Cuong, Deputy Management Board of Ho Chi Minh City High-Tech Park (SHTP) at the announcement ceremony of the 2nd Circuit Design Competition for Smart Cities in 2024, on the morning of December 18.

The contest is chaired by the Management Board of Ho Chi Minh City Hi-Tech Park, in coordination with annual organizers, for students, trainees, and young people who are passionate about researching the field of semiconductors. Projects will go through four rounds of competition including: preliminary selection, idea completion, professional evaluation and final.

Participating in the contest, contestants are trained and interact with experts to perfect ideas and design processes on international standard software. Projects that win high awards will continue to receive incubation support, progressing to develop and transfer products to production. According to Mr. Cuong, this is the organizational method that the Global Semiconductor IC Association (SEMI) and leading enterprises in IC design such as Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens are implementing.

This year, SHTP coordinated with the National Innovation Center, the Ministry of Planning and Investment (NIC) and the Da Nang Artificial Intelligence and Circuit Design Research and Training Center. The goal is to encourage products that can be applied immediately. “The organizing unit and partners will support many resources for projects to be commercialized,” Mr. Cuong said.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Le Quyen, Deputy Director in charge of NIC’s Hanoi facility, said that in the Microchip Human Resources Development Program to 2030 with an orientation to 2050 approved by the Prime Minister, Vietnam aims to train 50,000 technical skills. high quality master. She hopes that this year’s competition will receive many creative ideas and be supported with resources to develop into high-quality projects.

The first year the competition received 39 participating projects, mainly from students. The organizing committee awarded 7 prizes, of which the first prize (30 million VND) went to a chip project for sensors of students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Natural Sciences. Second prize (20 million VND) was awarded to the project of designing hardware to eliminate fog in smart camera images by students of Ho Chi Minh City University of Technical Education. The third prize (10 million VND) went to the project of designing a high-performance SAR ADC circuit to apply digital conversion of signals from sensors for an IoT system by students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Natural Sciences. There are four consolation prizes (5 million VND) each for four chip design project groups in the fields of security, digit recognition, control… According to the Organizing Committee, one winning project is of interest to businesses. , transfer negotiations.