Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have launched parallel campaigns to recruit doctoral-level semiconductor talent, following their earlier rounds of general hiring. Amid a rapidly shifting paradigm in semiconductor process technology, both companies are throwing their full weight behind securing research and development talent that will determine their future competitiveness.
According to industry sources Wednesday, Samsung Electronics will hold a recruitment forum called the "Tech & Career (T&C) Forum" at major engineering universities across the country, beginning at Seoul National University on Tuesday and continuing at KAIST on Aug. 3.
Attendance is limited to doctoral students in science and engineering fields and postdoctoral researchers holding a PhD. Forums are also planned at Korea University, Sungkyunkwan University, Yonsei University, Pohang University of Science and Technology, and Hanyang University.
Samsung Electronics has held summer forums at major universities each year to attract top talent. While previous editions focused on organizational culture and technical seminars, this year the company will for the first time run a "Vision Talk" program presenting its semiconductor business vision.
The Vision Talk segment will feature the planning team of Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions (DS) division, which will lay out the division's semiconductor business strategy and direction. With the semiconductor business posting record earnings and entering a phase of rapid growth this year, the company aims to present a detailed vision for sustaining that momentum and get ahead of rivals in securing top-tier talent.
In addition, senior technology executives from the DS division will conduct technical seminars by job function — covering design, process and AI roles — and will also explain the doctoral scholarship program. A separate session will be dedicated to the program's details. The doctoral scholarship program provides research funding to PhD candidates and offers them an opportunity to join the company upon graduation, serving as a mechanism to identify and cultivate promising technical talent at an early stage.
SK hynix plans to send President Kwak Noh-jung and other C-suite executives to the United States in the third week of September to hold the "SK Global Forum" for researchers enrolled at overseas universities. The event will feature presentations on the company's growth strategy and latest technology vision as part of a broader push to recruit top AI and semiconductor talent.
SK hynix, which eliminated academic requirements for the first time in its hiring process in the first half of this year, is accepting applications for its global scholarship program through Sunday. The program targets doctoral candidates expected to graduate after May next year and postdoctoral researchers whose contracts are ending.
SK hynix will provide accepted candidates with approximately 36 million won ($24,400) in tuition support along with an opportunity to join the company. The five recruitment tracks are design, system architecture and solution software, package solution research and development, R&D process, and device.
Through this recruitment drive, the company plans to bring in memory semiconductor design researchers as well as specialists in custom HBM — a fiercely contested frontier in next-generation HBM development — Compute Express Link (CXL), which is positioned to succeed HBM, and next-generation low-power processing-in-memory (PIM) technology, which performs computation directly within the memory chip.
SK hynix is also recruiting packaging development talent, an area that has emerged as a potential game changer in the AI semiconductor market. Packaging technology — which involves stacking multiple chips vertically or integrating chips with different functions into a single unit — has become a core competitive differentiator that determines a chip's final performance and power efficiency, prompting companies to compete fiercely for specialized engineers.
Earlier this year, the Japanese arm of US chipmaker Micron Technology sent executives and engineers to South Korea to hold recruitment sessions at Korea University and Yonsei University.
Industry observers expect the competition for top-tier talent to intensify further as the three major memory chipmakers accelerate both capacity expansion and next-generation advanced process technology development.
joze@heraldcorp.com
