Japan’s next chip challenge: finding engineers
Japan, along with a number of companies, has invested a lot to build up the country’s domestic chip industry. The next challenge is to find a multitude of engineers to run and operate it.
The country’s eight biggest chip companies need to hire 35’000 engineers in the next ten years, says the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, according to a report by Electronics Weekly.
As if the ongoing material shortage isn’t enough, the domestic industry is facing, according to the publication, a shortage of engineers. TSMC, among those companies, is aiming to hire around 1’700 workers together with Sony for its eight billion+ plant in Kyushu. Beside TSMC, companies such as Kioxia and Renesas are incresing their production capacity.
Hideki Wakabayashi, professor at the Tokyo University of Science, and head of the policy proposal task force at the JEITA semiconductor board, told Nikkei that ”it is often said that semiconductors are lacking, but the biggest shortage is engineers”, Electronics Weekly writes.
Takashi Miyamori, director at Toshiba, also told Nikkei that ”most Japanese studying science subjects are more interested in IT, not necessarily semiconductors”.
