S.Korea needs bold investment to keep K-chip supremacy: SNU scholar

The South Korean government and the private sector must commit to more generous and comprehensive support for the country's memory chip industry if it wants to maintain its dominance in the face of America’s rally to advance its semiconductor industry, said a renowned engineering professor at Seoul National University (SNU).

“Korea can survive the competition only if its homegrown chip products from state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities prove to be profoundly superior to Micron's,” Hwang Cheol-seong, a distinguished professor at SNU’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, told The Korea Economic Daily on Sunday.

One of the country’s preeminent engineering scholars, Hwang's primary research fields include semiconductor devices.

He warned the US government would soon start giving its leading memory chip maker Micron Technology Inc. outright federal support, after the Biden administration officially announced a plan to regain control of the memory chip industry, as described in guidelines to the CHIPS and Science Act unveiled last week.

“This will directly challenge Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as a real threat,” said Hwang.

In the guidelines, the US government made clear its ambition to regain global hegemony by 2030 in four core chip technologies: high-capacity memory chips, advanced chip packing, chip processing and the creation of large-scale chip clusters.

For decades, the global memory chip industry has been dominated by Korean and Taiwanese chip companies, after the US gradually lost ground over its lackluster manufacturing competitiveness.

In particular, Korea’s top memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc., have been leading the global memory chip market with dominant leadership in DRAM and NAND flash.

“It is time for Korea to think about ‘where it can excel,' not ‘what it wants to do,' in the semiconductor sector,” said Hwang.

With competition for control of the global chip industry set to intensify in line with the surging importance of advanced memory chips in AI devices, supercomputers and autonomous vehicles, Korea must act swiftly to stay competitive, through bold investments in fostering semiconductor talent.

“Semiconductor professors are changing their areas of study to AI, bio, energy and environment,” said Hwang. “There are no scholars available to join universities' semiconductor departments.”

He blamed stingy financial support from the government and private sector for the shortage of chip scholars.

Hwang called on the Korean government to enlarge its budget for advancing the country’s chip industry and bump up support to universities.

Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at hjs@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.