What is the future for made-in-Vietnam chips?
7/23/2015 10:53:22 AM

The Vietnam National University Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Center (ICDREC) has made an 8/16/32 byte microprocessor, but it is still too early to say whether it will have commercial potential.

Belco’s general director Tran Dinh Khoi said his company would use IP JPEG2000 made by ICDREC for its closed-circuit television (CCTVs). IP cores and image compression chips in Belco’s cameras are all imports.

A representative of ICDREC said the center has over 50 IP cores of different kinds, of which over 40 have been offered on international trading floors, valued at $40 million.

He also said that some IP cores have been transferred by ICDREC to domestic enterprises and organizations, including national defence units with the total value of VND20 billion.

Prior to that, a Japanese company ordered large quantities of ICDREC’s chips to make wireless sensors.

However, the good news is not enough to ensure a bright future for Vietnam-made chips and Vietnam’s IC industry, experts said.

Ky Thiet Bao, director of Thiet Bao Trade & Service Company specializing in making automatic devices, while commenting that ICDREC’s chip is a great pride of Vietnam, noted that mastering technology is not enough to ensure products in the market.

Bao’s company manufactures testing machines and robots and has high demands for chips. Bao has tried to identify the possibility of using Vietnamese chips for his products.

He realized that ICDRED can only make one sort of chip, while the market needs synchronized chips with many different types that fit different types of motherboards.

Bao said his company has high demand for chips with higher features than ICDREC can provide.

Hailing the ICDREC’s success of developing chips at a reasonable production cost of VND50,000 per product, Nguyen Long, secretary general of the Vietnam Association for Information Processing (VAIP), noted that it will be difficult for ICDREC’s chips to compete with products which have been available in the market for a long time.

“It is not easy to market products though we know Vietnam needs billions of chips every year,” Long said.

Professor Nguyen Van Ngo, honorary Chairman of Radio and Electronics Society of Vietnam, also noted that it was not easy to put the chip which into commercial development.

He went on to say that as the chips still cannot be manufactured on an industrial scale, they would be uncompetitive in price.

“Vietnam does not have experience in this field because it just now starts making semiconductor circuits. Therefore, the state support will play a very important role in Vietnam’s chip industry development,” he added.

Dat Viet  
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