‘Vietnamese engineers can create the most advanced chips’

The information was said by Dr. Le Quang Dam, General Director of Marvell Vietnam – a chip design company worth more than 270 billion USD, at the International Conference on IC and Sensor Technology 2026 (Wefab 2026), held on June 19.

Mr. Dam said that Marvell Vietnam has more than 600 engineers recruited domestically. This team is involved in every step from architectural ideas, circuit design, physical design to actual chip testing after production for Marvell’s most advanced chip products specialized in data centers.

According to Dr. Dam, Vietnam has young human resources with a good technical foundation to develop into high-quality semiconductor human resources. However, to realize this potential, he recommended that there should be a combination between universities and businesses.

Sharing the same opinion, Professor Konrad Young, former director of TSMC’s R&D Center, acknowledged: “Vietnam has a young talented workforce that is among the top in the world, both in terms of quantity and level of enthusiasm. The quality of STEM training in Vietnam, up to the university level, is at a very high level.”

However, this expert believes that training programs in Vietnam lack the participation of businesses and are not linked to actual working processes.

Professor Konrad Young proposed that universities need to work with businesses in the industry, especially in the context of many semiconductor businesses working in Vietnam. They have human resource needs and are willing to provide expertise or internship programs. For example A student can be part of a real project, not necessarily to create a competitive product, but to experience the life cycle of a project and a real industrial environment. “This is also the way at TSMC,” he said.

According to Associate Professor Dr. Pham Bao Son, Deputy Director of Hanoi National University, businesses can work with universities from the first stage of building training programs, followed by internship programs or working together on research and development projects. It is necessary to identify areas in the semiconductor value chain where Vietnam can build real capacity, train highly skilled personnel, and thereby gradually move up the value chain. “This will require close cooperation between universities, research facilities, and businesses,” Mr. Son said.

Currently, there are about 70 IC design companies operating in Vietnam, including many big names such as Marvell, Renesas, Ampere, Synopsys, and Infineon.

Vietnam aims to train 50,000 engineers and human resources with university degrees or higher to serve the semiconductor industry by 2030. According to Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, Deputy Director of Information Technology Industry, Director of the National Center for Support of Semiconductor Chip Trial Production, the target for the period 2030-2040 is 100,000 people. “We determine that the most important pillar in Vietnam’s semiconductor strategy is human resources, this is the factor that helps us participate in the global supply chain and develop the domestic semiconductor industry,” Mr. Tuan said.