After entering the agreement of the Taiwan-U.S. Semiconductor Workforce Advancement Program (SWAP) with Purdue University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) has collectively worked with the global known computing platform company Arm’s Semiconductor Education Alliance to fulfill the gaps between schools and workplaces in terms of Computer Science, Electronic Information Engineering and Intelligent Control Technology (CEI) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) through collaboration and resources integration.
Semiconductor competition sets off globally. A low birth rate impacts Taiwan, and it is now facing double the challenges of annually reducing semiconductor talents and workforce quality. According to the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association White Paper, only ten thousand students graduate from the master’s and doctoral programs of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics and Information and Communications Technology in Taiwan per year. Even though half of the said talents devote themselves to the semiconductor industry, the workforce gaps on the industry end still exist.
Therefore, in addition to establishing the post-baccalaureate program in Electronics and Photonics to recruit non-STEM talents, NYCU established the Department of Microelectronics, hoping to root downwardly the semiconductor talents. Meanwhile, NYCU has collaborated with Arm to establish the Semiconductor Education Alliance, making it the first among the top universities to join the Alliance. NYCU, with its five semiconductor-related major institutes—College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Computer Science, Industry Academia Innovation School, International Colleges of Semiconductor Technology, and College of Artificial Intelligence—will dedicate to minimizing the gaps between academia and industry.
Semiconductor Education Alliance was the global project published by Arm in July of this year, receiving support from its collaborators such as the global key universities, governmental research institutes, and industries, including Cornell University and Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute are its members. The purpose of the Semiconductor Education Alliance is to solve the increasing challenges in terms of recruiting talent and the skill improvement of employees in industries through the crossover combination of industries, officials, and universities, establishing a closer collaboration between industries, officials, and universities on common targets, resources sharing, and best practice and paradigm community, etc.
Vice President Chen-Yi Lee said that the design of chips, hardware, and software has become critical items in various fields of scientific research and artificial intelligence. NYCU specializes in nurturing technology talents. Therefore, one of our missions is to foster high-level talents in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and establish a global identity for these individuals. On the one hand, to include the Semiconductor Education Alliance initiated by Arm is to share teaching resources NYCU accumulated in the long term in fields of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, and on the other hand, to acquire knowledge from the global most advanced semiconductor intellectual property core products, expanding interdisciplinary education and research and assisting students keeping abreast of the latest technology in the industry upon graduation.
Arm Taiwan president CK Tseng said that Arm continuously has brought innovative technology to the next generation of computing and left no stone unturned in supporting the cultivation of talents in universities and research fields. Once launched, the Semiconductor Education Alliance received acknowledgments from many enterprises and organizations in industries, officials, and universities. After the Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute joined, NYCU became the first top university to join the Alliance. We believe that this collaboration will foster optimal and abundant talent cultivation in the development of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
The importance of the semiconductor industry for global strategy is widely known, which fosters investments with tens of billions of US dollars and opportunities for growth and innovation for every aspect of the semiconductor field, from design and wafer manufacturing to deployment. Governments around the globe have expanded their investments in semiconductor talents in recent years, accelerating the collaboration with companies whose technology leads the industry. This time, NYCU collaborated with Arm, the global computing platform leader, to collectively solve challenges of talent cultivation, hoping that Taiwan becomes the pivotal pivot of talent cultivation in global chip design.
