Launching the National Center to Support Semiconductor Chip Trial Production

The National Center for Semiconductor Chip Trial Production Support (VNMPW/CC), launched on the morning of June 26 in Hanoi, provides design tools, supports design appraisal and verification, and acts as a connection point with chip factories (foundries), packaging and testing units and international technology partners to organize trial production for universities, research institutes and domestic businesses through the Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) model, combining many designs. chips in the same manufacturing batch to reduce costs.

After being designed, the chip needs to be trial-produced to check its operation on real silicon, detect errors in performance, power, temperature and manufacturing process to complete the product. Currently, research units and chip design businesses in Vietnam have to place trial production at foreign factories as individual projects, increasing costs and extending product development time. Trial production costs range from 30,000 to 200,000 USD, with production waiting time of 12-24 months.

Meanwhile, Vietnam’s semiconductor ecosystem is growing rapidly with about 60 chip design businesses, 7,000 design engineers and 166 higher education institutions implementing training programs in semiconductors and related fields.

“Vietnam needs to remove a fundamental bottleneck which is the ability to realize chip designs into actual products,” said Director of Information Technology Industry Department Nguyen Khac Lich.

According to this unit’s statistics, there is currently a need for trial production of about 30,000 chips in the country. The National Center to Support Semiconductor Chip Trial Production is expected to remove bottlenecks and serve as a shared infrastructure to speed up the development process of Vietnamese chip products.

“The step from the legal corridor and law to concretization as today’s trial production center in a short time shows the determination of the Ministry of Science and Technology in developing the semiconductor industry,” Minister Vu Hai Quan said at the event.

From now until 2027, the State will support 100% of trial production costs to promote universities, research institutes, businesses and design groups to participate in research, development and testing of semiconductor products.

During the 2028-2030 period, the center will continue to receive partial support for trial production costs, tool completion and in-depth technical services to increase design quality and product commercialization capabilities. From 2030 onwards, the goal is to become a reputable semiconductor chip trial production support center in Southeast Asia.

“The role of the MPW model is not just to send designs to manufacturing but is a technical system to reduce risks before putting the design into production, improve the quality of domestic chip design and prove the practical application of the product,” said Ms. Nguyen Bich Yen, President of VSAP Lab, representative of the new center’s consulting expert group consisting of 21 members from corporations, research institutes, and universities.

Experts recommend that units in Vietnam can participate in the design and trial production of specialized edge processing chips for IoT devices, language and image processors optimized for Vietnamese, hardware security chips and chiplets – small “pieces” of chips, each piece has a specialized task and is combined together with advanced packaging to form a complete chip.

“The newly established center creates a solution to the difficulties facing IC design research groups. Focusing on one focal point, supported by the budget, helps design results to be manufactured, tested, packaged, tested and completed,” said Associate Professor, Dr. Tran Cao Vinh, Deputy Director of Ho Chi Minh City National University.

Leaders of the Ministry of Science and Technology affirmed that the opportunity to access the shared platform is open to all institutes, schools, and businesses and expects organizations to develop Vietnamese semiconductor products through this center.