A GARRULOUS doll with an Australian accent has become a big hit with
thousands of young Koreans. The doll contains a speech chip programmed to utter
demands like `Feed me!鈥� `Wash me!鈥� and `Play with me!鈥� at appropriate times of
the day.
The chip was designed in Melbourne by Semiconductor Technologies Australia
(STA). Last year, as the Korean market for the dolls took off鈥攁bout 100
000 were sold in the first two months alone鈥擲TA exported around
$500 000 worth of the chips to Korea.
The speech chips are the first fruit of a remarkable venture that began two
years ago when a deal was struck between the Victorian Government and the Korean
semiconductor firm, Anam. The Seoul-based company is the world鈥檚 largest
packager of chips. It fits the slivers of silicon produced by firms like Intel
and Motorola with metal connectors, and then pops them into slabs of ceramic or
plastic. This is unglamorous work and no longer very profitable.
Advertisement
As chip manufacture is increasingly carried out by specialist silicon
foundries (like Taiwan鈥檚 TSMC), design has become the most lucrative activity in
today鈥檚 US$200 billion semiconductor industry. Companies are using
customised integrated circuits to differentiate their products. As a result, the
demand for chip designers is becoming insatiable. When Anam decided to move into
design, it looked to Australia to satisfy its needs.
But Australia has no semiconductor industry to speak of. So isn鈥檛 Melbourne
rather an odd place to choose to set up a chip design house? The reason for the
choice, says STA assistant managing director Koon Hyung Choi, lies in the skills
of Australian graduates. 鈥淎ustralia has many strong points, such as software,鈥�
he says, 鈥渂ut Australia鈥檚 weak point is commercialisation.鈥� That is something
the Koreans are good at. Choi鈥檚 idea is to combine strengths in order to
challenge world markets.
To this end, STA is taking a long-term, step-by-step approach. The company
began by distributing more than a million dollars worth of electronic design
software to six universities鈥擱MIT, Melbourne, Monash, Swinburne, La Trobe
and Victoria University of Technology.
STA then ran three-week training courses for 35 professors. These academics
in turn have trained more than 200 students in chip design. And Choi employs the
pick of the crop. His company has already hired half a dozen engineers, all of
them Australians. This year, Choi plans to recruit a further 10, and he will go
on hiring until he has a workforce of more than 50 designers by 2003.
While his initial targets will be niche markets like the speech chips for
dolls, there are other spinoffs. Last year, for instance, Asia Design
Corporation (ADC), a small Korean venture firm, came up with a design for a
microprocessor chip which it thought had potential for embedded applications.
(Embedded controllers are used in ever-increasing quantities, especially in
cars, to operate things like windscreen wipers.)
But the company needed to know how its design would perform against
international benchmarks, and how it could be altered to improve its
performance. Lacking the in-house resources of a giant such as Intel, ADC was
forced to look outside for answers to these questions. Choi introduced his
fellow-countrymen to Paul Beckett, who heads RMIT鈥檚 Department of Computer
Systems Engineering.
For Beckett and his students, working with the Koreans has been a wonderful
opportunity to get their hands dirty in a real-world project鈥攁n
opportunity his department has long lacked. Beckett hopes that this
collaboration will lead to a longer-term relationship, one that will involve
RMIT doing parts of the design and evaluation for STA, ADC and perhaps
eventually other Korean firms.