Tatas look to attract chip manufacturing talent from Taiwan

Tata Electronics has invited Taiwanese professionals with 5 to 16 years of experience

The Tata Group, which is setting up a semiconductor foundry and a chip packaging plant in India, is looking to attract top talent from Taiwan, the country that produces more than 60 percent of the world's chips.

Tata Electronics is heading to the Taiwanese county of Hsinchu, which boasts of a number of chip fabrication plants of companies including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), United Microelectronics Corporation, and Epistar, on a roadshow on April 13.

"I suspect the most important challenges will be to offer attractive wages and career opportunities. The fact that Tata's facility will be a joint venture with PSMC likely facilitates this," said Chris Miller, author of the book Chip War. "Even beyond this facility, India would benefit from closer collaboration with Taiwanese firms and universities, given the complementarity in their technology workforces."

The Tata roadshow comes just after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake rocked the Southeast Asian nation on April 3 and temporarily halted operations at numerous chip plants. Miller said such events are planned well in advance and did not attach any significance to the timing of the roadshow.

In a poster for the roadshow, Tata Electronics invited Taiwanese professionals with 5 to 16 years of experience in various semiconductor manufacturing roles. It said candidates must be willing to relocate to India and will undergo 18 months of initial training in Taiwan.

Incentives, infra needed

The company has listed seven roles for which it is looking to hire people, including equipment engineers, yield engineers and automation engineers. It is also recruiting diploma-holding technicians to perform electrical and mechanical troubleshooting.

"To attract them to India will require a mix of attractive incentives along with an infrastructure that ensures smooth transition for any professional willing to contribute to building India's semiconductor segment," said Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research. "A semiconductor skill development fund or something like this should be allocated only to incentivise global semiconductor industry key professionals in leadership roles especially in nurturing startups. Apart from this, knowledge transfer programmes will help."

The government recently approved a proposal by the Tatas to set up a fab under its mega chip subsidy scheme. It will be set up by Tata Electronics and Taiwan’s PSMC in Gujarat’s Dholera at a projected cost of Rs 91,000 crore.

This fab will produce mostly 28 nanometre (nm) chips, apart from 50 nm, 55 nm and 90 nm ones, for electric vehicles, telecom, defence, automotive, consumer electronics, display, and power electronics.

Further, Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test Pvt Ltd (TSAT) will set up a semiconductor packaging unit in Morigaon, Assam, with an investment of Rs 27,000 crore and the capacity to produce 48 million chips daily.

While the fab in Dholera is expected to create 20,000 direct and indirect skilled jobs, the unit in Morigaon could create 27,000 employment opportunities, the conglomerate said earlier.

Skill versus bill

As India looks to ramp up its semiconductor production industry, the country will need at least half a million skilled professionals in the space over the next few years, according to Pathak of Counterpoint.

"These range from design to fab to ATMP (assembly, testing, marking, and packaging). The best way to meet this is to design our curriculum at the engineering level to have a mix of graduates with basic preparedness towards semi space," he said.

Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan recently criticised the government's chip subsidy package of Rs 76,000 crore as too costly to attract employment opportunities in the sector, at "Rs 4 crore per job created."

This is over 150 percent of the central higher education budget, when higher education institutions lack resources, he said in a LinkedIn post.

"We have much more pressing needs, such as putting spectrometers into our colleges so we can produce first-rate science students. Furthermore, it is far from clear how the government decides which industry, sector, or firm gets subsidies. Chip manufacturing is certainly not a labour-intensive industry, when jobs are our most important challenge," he added.