Cultivating local talent in chip designs

Sarawak Microelectronics Design (SMD) Semiconductor Sdn Bhd was established in 2022, a boutique fabless chip design house which is a wholly owned company by the Sarawak government through the Sarawak Research and Development Council under the purview of the Ministry of Education, Innovation and Talent Development (MEITD).

SMD Semiconductor sets its objective to facilitate creation of an ideal ecosystem to position Sarawak as a primary investment destination for semiconductor and solutions providers.

Shariman Jamil, the chief executive officer (CEO) of SMD Semiconductor during a recent interview underscored the importance of cultivating local talent and shared his insights on the future trajectory of the chip design industry within the state.

Q: Can you provide information on SMD Semiconductor?

SMD Semiconductor Sdn Bhd is a wholly owned entity by state government. We are actually incorporated through the Sarawak Research and Development Ordinance 2017 and we report to MEITD. SMD stands for Sarawak Microelectronics Design, and that’s where SMD semiconductors Sdn Bhd come actually. We are specialising in business chip designs and also semiconductor as overall, we are involved mostly in designing the chip, as well as working very closely with our international partners either by giving them services or also we help in the aspirations to develop chip.

Q: What do you think of Sarawak’s skills and talent in designing chip? And is there any challenges, how do SMD overcome it?

Shariman shows one of the chips.

I believe that this is a very new field to Sarawakians, but the reality is, the industry is not new in Sarawak when it comes to semiconductors. In the past we have X-FAB which is already operating in Sarawak for about 20 years and they are one of the major contributors to the state when it comes to export the products out of Malaysia. But for integrated circuit (IC) design, it is very new. Therefore, one of the aspirations from Sarawak government is to encourage more high value jobs, research and development (R&D) activities in Sarawak and also to work with our industries partners. For us, IC design is something we want to establish in Sarawak now, so that’s why I think the other area that we are looking at is in the talent development is training programme itself. We want to produce more chips designers from our local Sarawakians and to contribute to our semiconductors industries particularly in Samajaya area.

Q: Talking about training programmes for talent development in chip designs, any collaboration from SMD with state owned technical institutions or training centres?

Yes, recently we announced about the talent development in semiconductors chip designs, which we aim to produce 500 semiconductors professionals by 2030, so we are expecting to run this programme in the next few years. Currently, we are actively engaged with the industries players where we develop the training contents, and of course we expect more to come in future. We have Melexis (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, X-FAB Sarawak Sdn Bhd which is one of the main players in semiconductor, they are also based in Kuching, we also work with Synopsys in Singapore, Centre for Technology Excellence Sarawak (CENTEXS, Swinburne University of Technology and hopefully with all our local universities. With the collaboration we can run this upskilling training as a six-month training programme. For those fresh graduates,they enrol into this six months training programme and we give them all the training required and exposure and they will be employed by the industries for six months programme. Another programme is working closely with the universities to come out with proposed graduates programme such as Masters Degree programme, where currently we are working with Swinburne University to come out with new Masters Degree in Microelectronics and Chip Designs.

Q: Elaborate more on challenges faced by the industry nowadays.

Of course talent is one of it, because people are asking us why we need people and we are not a training institution but you have obligation to produce more Sarawakians to be chip designers and we know without talent, we cannot execute our business plan. So, we are just not talking about local talent, but we are also talking about Malaysian talent as a whole and the world talent, because there is a global shortage in semiconductors and chip designs.

Q: Any recent expansion plan of SMD?

For SMD in terms of our big task, the big framework business framework that we have, we have four strategic pillars. The first one is looking into design and development, working very closely with our partners such as Melexis and X-FAB and this is the first pillar that we have and for the next five years we are going to have new strengthened working relationship with our partners in our first pillar.

Second pillar we are looking at more downstream application and services, so by working closely with partners we see that one chip can produce five end products, that is the value we see which are multiplying values and also we are looking at application in the state itself to start with. There is a lot of need in the state when it comes to managing our environment and driving our sustainability agenda, there is a lot of things that we can do when it comes to second pillar which is application and services.

Shariman (left) looks at one of the chip designs by SMD Semiconductor Sdn Bhd’s director of Backend Engineering Khalil Yaacob (right)

Third pillar is focusing more on new intellectual property (IP), developing it with new chips, new frontier design technologies. Fourth pillar is looking at the new technology ventures, looking at partnering, setting up infrastructure in the state together with partners. This is the key because when we talk about infrastructure ecosystem we will work very closely with partners, private investors, foreign investors as we feel that our industry here has a very strong position to the rest of the world. Having one of the active players in the semiconductors supply chain, globally and having good talent pool, of course, we are better than Indonesia or some other developing countries when it comes to semi-conductors talent, maybe Singapore more advanced to us but when compared to Vietnam, The Philippines, or even Indonesia, we are much more advanced when it comes to technology. That is our inspiration for our industry in Sarawak, the main motivation is to move up as well as creating new jobs for Sarawakians. We are also calling more experienced Sarawakians from overseas to come back and contribute and work with us to spearhead our semi-conductor ecosystem in the state.

Q: Talking about chips designed by SMD, can you tell us besides designing the chips, what other things that SMD does and what is the commercial value of the chips?

Yes, we design and is involved in the chip function, we are also involved in testing this chip. To start with it, we design the customer product. On its commercial value, it depends on the function, if it is used for space or satellite, it may be costly, some chip may cause few hundred thousands of US Dollar, depending on the function. But if you are talking about a normal chip, such as consumer chip probably it only costs about one US dollar per chip but they are selling few tonnes of billion chips. One billion chips is one billion dollar. It depends, but we play volume.

Q: What is the ongoing project for SMD?

We are working in three projects now although I cannot specify what project, but mostly working with our partners to give design services, we render chip design services to our partner, currently in automotive chip or chip in the car. That’s what we do to start with it. Eventually we also want to have this chip design made in Kuching, Sarawak. Owned by a Sarawak company. We need to promote that culture.