VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam has the capacity to manufacture microprocessors, but has yet to overcome many difficulties to fully develop a chip industry.

“The biggest difficulties are still ahead. It will be not easy to develop the chip industry since Vietnamese favor foreign-made brands,” said Minister of Science and Technology Nguyen Quan, when asked about the commercial development of Vietnam-made chips.

The Vietnam National University Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Center (ICDREC) successfully designed Chip VN1632 in 2010 and then SG8V1 in 2014, hailed as wonderful achievements of Vietnamese science.

The SG8V1 chip has been used in 30 commercial products, including vehicle-monitoring devices, container locks, electronic meters and automatic lighting systems, which have helped enterprises improve productivity and minimize investment rates.

However, this is just the very beginning of Vietnam’s chip industry development, according to Quan.

What Vietnam striving to do now is to make products on an industrial scale. However, it is very costly to set up a chip factory, particularly when the market is unclear.

“If the market is not large enough, the factory will go bankrupt, and Vietnam will not have its chip industry,” he said.

How can a large market be created?

Quan said that the country would have a big market if Vietnam-made microprocessors were used by Electricity of Vietnam’s electronic meters and by the Ministry of Transport’s RSID systems, and by household electronics manufacturers.

However, Quan said that it would be not easy to persuade Vietnamese to use Vietnam-made products.

“Vietnamese still do not have a high level of confidence on made-in-Vietnam products,” Quan explained. “They prefer foreign-made products, thinking that foreign-made is better than domestically made products.”

Nevertheless, MIC, though anticipating major challenges, said that it would try to the last breath to develop the Vietnam’s chip industry.

ICDREC is now implementing a project on making chips and RSID with the initial investment capital of VND124 billion.

This has been described as the largest-scale project in the history of Vietnam’s science and technology sector, funded by MST.

The ministry stated that it will give the biggest possible support to the project until finished products can be made.

Quan, at the latest conference on commercializing Vietnam-made chips, called on Vietnamese enterprises to make it a priority to use Vietnamese chips.

“If enterprises do this, Vietnam will have the opportunity to catch up with the world’s chip industry growth,” he said. “I wish to see a ‘buy Vietnamese chips’ movement.”

Analysts commented that Vietnam has every reason to gather strength to develop the chip industry.

Microprocessors, plus embedded software, will be the “brains” of all modern equipment. Currently, Vietnam needs 20 billion chips every year.

Dat Viet