Asia Rising - Is Korea's Telecom A Blueprint For The Future?
by Lee H. Goldberg

The IEEE's International Symposium on Solid State Circuits (ISSCC) always provides great insights into the future of our industry with presentations on leading-edge designs in virtually every semiconductor discipline. But a chance meeting with Dr Daeje Chin, South Korea's Minister of Information and Communication, may have overshadowed the 35-nm devices and billion-transistor chips with a striking picture of how a small country is using a focused vision and strategic investments for development.

The Ministry's "IT839 Strategy" lays out a roadmap for both developing South Korean technological infrastructure, and for building an electronics manufacturing capability that will power the country's economy for decades to come. And in contrast to many Western countries which are experiencing strong downward pressure on the wages of their workers, raising the per-capita income of South Koreans to US $20 k is an integral part of the stated goals of their ambitious, but realistic plan.

The IT839 stands for a collection of eight services, three infrastructure initiatives, and nine markets that will serve as "growth engines" to fuel a regenerative cycle of investments, returns, and rising income (summary below). Like any long-range plan, IT839 is not perfect in its approach (I'll point out a few problems later), but it does provide a solid roadmap for using the country's existing academic, technical, and social resources in a focused, and well-targeted manner to move its electronic industry beyond its current focus on commodity memory chips and low-end consumer goods into a dominant role in several critical electronics markets.

So far South Korea's widespread of deployment of broadband services and planned roll-out of a 3G wireless infrastructure appears to be on schedule, and accomplishing its stated mission of improving the lives of its citizens, creating a better infrastructure for business, and nurturing key technologies. This contrasts sharply with the fragmented patchwork of poorly-integrated "market-driven" infrastructure we suffer in North America. This, and other developments in Asia make increasingly apparent that, without some guidance and stewardship, the American electronics industry will become increasingly fragmented and defocused. Such disarray will further encourage the current exodus of good-paying jobs overseas and accelerate the brain-drain of the expertise that has helped us hold a dominant position in critical and highly competitive markets.

In addition to South Korea, China and India also have national technology development plans in place and are all too eager to take our place if we stumble. To maintain our leadership it's time to take a look at the global picture and come up with some long-term initiatives to cultivate and keep technologies, industries, and jobs within our shores.

Of course, we cannot simply copycat South Korea's plans since they are tailored to the country's unique cultural and economic conditions. For one thing, South Korea is a small, relatively heterogeneous country which can respond well to such a top-down plan. We'd also have trouble duplicating the extremely close ties between government and the company's major corporations that the South Korean plan relies on without raising serious anti-trust issues (unless of course, this was a defense program). An equivalent plan for the US would have to include a broader mix of large industry and the smaller, more agile companies that provide so much of the innovation here.

I'm no expert on economics, trade policy, or foreign relations, but there are a few things that come to mind which would be a good start towards ensuring that the high tech that's helped power our economy for the past half decade continues to produce a brighter future for us.

  1. Instead of spending its time policing celebrities' political remarks and "wardrobe malfunctions," our FCC needs to be concentrating on ways to encourage fundamental improvements in our infrastructure, such as semi-universal access to broadband services for schools, businesses, and individuals. Besides improving educational opportunities and helping small businesses enter the Internet economy, it would open the door to creating knowledge-based industries in remote and underdeveloped areas of our country.
  2. We've seen what a disaster a "market-based" communications policy made out of the 1st and 2nd generations of digital cellular and PCS infrastructure, so what would be the harm in having a little guidance from the government for our roll-out of 3G? A little coordination on common use of technologies, definition of basic services, and interoperability could speed up deployment, lower implementation costs, and create a much more seamless network of wireless voice, data, and perhaps even video services.
  3. Development of a national policy on Wi-Fi-based services will save us from the train wreck we face in the near future as too many wireless nodes fight over too little bandwidth. While there should be lots of wiggle room to allow for informal networks and grass-roots innovation, we really need to take a good look at how to structure the commercial services that are beginning to take advantage of the unregulated spectrum used by the 802.11 standard. Proper guidelines will help us use this promising resource wisely to create a wireless "datasphere" that will help make business and industry more efficient and provide new and useful services for the public sector. Without such guidance, we risk a "Tragedy of the Commons" scenario in the airwaves.
  4. Our nation needs to fund and refocus its R&D efforts, with an emphasis on the "R." Corporate and government spending on research as a percentage of revenues has consistently fallen so that we now lag behind many nations. Also, too much of our research is being directed at short-term commercialization of technologies, with too few resources being allocated to the long-term fundamental research that will form the heart of our economy several decades from now.

    And while we're at it a national initiative to coordinate and accelerate development of deep sub-micron and nano-scale semiconductor technologies would be a great idea. If we expect to keep the technical "high ground," the nation's semiconductor companies must coordinate their efforts and work in unison with government-funded research in leading universities.
  5. We need to develop enough on-shore silicon fab capacity to ensure a steady supply of the chips that power our economy. With so many of our chips coming from Taiwan, Singapore, and other overseas locales, we run the risk of having an economic choke point that's as serious as our current dependence on imported oil. And domestically-produced silicon does not run the risks of "leakage" of critical IP that is commonly experienced when we take cutting-edge products overseas.

Of course some of these ideas may be impractical or redundant and I welcome your thoughts on this. I also know that you probably have ideas of your own about national initiatives that could help boost our economy while creating good-paying jobs of all kinds within the electronics industry. Perhaps it's time to start sharing them with our industry associations, elected officials, and employers. Unless we do something soon, it may be too late.

Comments? Questions? Ideas you'd care to share with me? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com

Brief Overview of Korea's "IT839 Strategy"

8 Services:

3 Infrastructures:

9 New Growth Engines:

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