While many of the major tech companies are facing a huge wave of layoffs, there are others that are facing the opposite problem: the shortage of talent and qualified personnel and specialized. It’s what’s happening in the manufacture of state-of-the-art chipsin companies like Samsung or TSMC, according to GSMarena.
Samsung can’t find enough staff to cover its level of 3-nanometer chip production, and has reportedly resorted to moving employees from some production and research teams to others to address the shortage.
It has also assigned entire work teams to research and development tasks for these new nodes, in order to advance their creation. Specifically, the teams working at Samsung’s research and development center in Hwaseong will be in charge of optimizing production from a single wafer. This, in an environment where next-generation chips are in increasing demand, while chips made with legacy technologies are no longer in such high demand. Also, it is on the decline.
This, together with the shortage of specialized workers at the source, and of experts in this type of chips, has meant that Samsung has stopped accepting orders for chips made with old technologies. Specifically, it is no longer accepting orders for chips made with technologies between 130 and 65 nanometers for small and medium-sized companies specializing in semiconductor design. Apparently, it does continue to meet orders for chips with the aforementioned technologies from large companies.
Samsung isn’t the only chipmaker affected by a shortage of talent to make high-tech chips, which are in high demand. Other companies, including leading semiconductor maker TSMC, face very similar problems.
According to various estimates, the US companies Chip design and manufacturing companies face a shortage of specialized chip personnel that may reach 27,000 people in the next 10 years. In China, the situation for the next few years is much worse: by 2025, the country will need 300,000 more specialized workers than will be available for research, development, and manufacturing of state-of-the-art chips.
As for South Korea, it needs no fewer than 6,000 professionals with master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering related to semiconductor design and manufacturing to be able to meet all the demand from its chip-making companies.
The estimates for the sector that several analysts have go through a market expansion of a third in the next five years. This is going to make samsung have to take steps to get staff. Among these measures is a increased investment in top South Korean universitieswith which he hopes to reach various agreements.
But it does not seem that the way to obtain the personnel that it needs in this way is going to be easy either, since in recent years university education in South Korea has lowered its quality. This can make it much more difficult for Samsung to get the qualified staff it needs.
