Offer an annual salary of one million and spend hundreds of millions to build talent housing! OV and Xiaomi invest heavily in manufacturing cores to alleviate talent shortage

Recently, there has been more and more news about VIVO, OPPO, and Xiaomi’s self-developed chips. Different from Huawei’s previous core manufacturing direction, OV and Xiaomi mainly start with ISP chips. It is understood that VIVO is recruiting chip-related personnel with an annual salary of one million, among which the annual salary of ISP chip directors is as high as 144W-180W, and the highest annual salary of chip planning experts also reaches 144W. In terms of OPPO, the annual salary of fresh graduates has reached 40W. In addition, in order to attract and retain more talents, VIVO has also invested 4.5 billion to build talent housing in Dongguan, which will later be a residential area for R&D talents.

Industry insiders recall that three or four years ago, the annual salary of fresh graduates was generally around 20W; for engineers with two or three years of work experience, an annual salary of 60W was already within expectations. As the demand for talent increases, candidates' expectations for salary also increase. Judging from the current situation, the annual salary expectations of many candidates with a master's degree of two years are set at more than 50W. When candidates with a master's degree of three years' experience change jobs, their expectations double to 80W. Applicants with a master's degree of six years have an expected salary of 80W. It has reached the million level.

At present, except for Huawei, mobile phone manufacturers have not achieved great results in core manufacturing. Will such "sky-high" salaries increase the burden on enterprises? In addition to the reserve of R&D talents, what else do mobile phone manufacturers need to develop their own chips? What about the winning conditions in the later stages?

As early as 2014, Xiaomi announced that it would develop its own chips. Just three years later, Xiaomi successfully developed the ISP chip Pengpai C1. But in the later stage, Lei Jun said that he would temporarily give up mass production because of difficulties.

Today, Xiaomi has restarted its core manufacturing journey, and OPPO and VIVO have also collectively joined the core manufacturing team, first targeting image signal processor ISP chips. The core of self-developed chips is R&D talent. In recent years, the three major mobile phone manufacturers have reported that they are expanding their R&D personnel teams and increasing R&D investment.

In 2019, OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong publicly announced a R&D budget of 10 billion, which has been increasing year by year, and plans to expand the R&D team to more than 10,000 people. In 2020, OPPO announced for the first time a core-making plan code-named "Project Mariana". Until July this year, industry insiders revealed that OPPO was planning to build a chip team of 3,000 people, and the current number of team engineers has reached 1,000.

Also in 2019, VIVO quietly completed the registered trademarks of "vivo SoC" and "vivo chip", covering a series of processor-related products including central processing units, computer chips, computer storage devices, etc. . Looking back at VIVO's move to register these two trademarks, it can be said that it means preparing for self-developed chips. In 2020, VIVO's Shenzhen headquarters project with an investment of 4 billion will start construction and is expected to be completed by the end of 2024. It will house nearly 6,000 R&D personnel.

In July this year, news spread from the supply chain that vivo’s first self-developed ISP chip “Yueying” will be released soon. Although the news has not been officially confirmed, VIVO is offering an annual salary of one million yuan to recruit chip talents. This move can be said to be the "real hammer" for the final core. In August, VIVO Talent Room started construction. According to the registration information of vivo Talent Room project, the total investment in the project is 4.5 billion. The conditions for purchasing a house are: a bachelor's degree or above, working in vivo for more than three years, and paying taxes of more than 30,000 yuan in Dongguan last year.

Xiaomi, which started its core manufacturing journey 7 years ago, as of the end of 2020, has a total of 2.20,000 employees, of which more than 10,000 are R&D personnel, accounting for 47.12% of the company's total. Entering 2021, Lei Jun's official social media often issues recruitment advertisements for R&D personnel. In February, Lei Jun revealed that he would expand the recruitment of 5,000 engineers and increase R&D investment by 30 to 40%. Coincidentally, it is also reported that Xiaomi recently spent 700 million yuan to establish an apartment management company to solve the renting pressure of employees.

Wang Hua, general manager of the public relations department of Xiaomi Group, said that this is to solve the rental pressure of employees and improve their happiness.

But self-developed chips are not an easy task.

At present, some mobile phone SoC processes have reached 5nm, and consumers have increasingly higher performance requirements for mobile phones. Breakthroughs from 0 to 1 are in front of mobile phone manufacturers, which have not yet been self-developed. For OPPO and VIVO, which have chip experience, it means they need to have sufficient talent reserves to be able to catch up with Xiaomi, which is running ahead of schedule on the core manufacturing track.

High-end talents in integrated circuits have become the core competitiveness of the chip manufacturing track, so major companies in the industry are competing for chip talents.

Integrated circuit talents are being competed by companies and salaries are "skyrocketing". This not only reflects the shallow level of the talent pool in the industry, but also shows that companies hope to raise salaries to compete for more talents. 51job data shows that in March 2021, the demand for talents in the integrated circuit/semiconductor industry accounted for 5.5 of the total positions, which is the highest in history.

The shortage of chip talents has become one of the pain points in the development of the industry. my country's chip talent gap is about 300,000. Wang Zhihua, a professor at the School of Integrated Circuits at Tsinghua University, once said that if China wants to target half of the world's total chip output value, it will need 800,000 technical personnel.

Integrated circuit talents include chip design, wafer manufacturing, and packaging and testing. Among them, IC design companies have the most urgent recruitment demand. Data shows that in 2020, the number of chip design, wafer manufacturing, and packaging and testing will be the highest. The absolute values ??of new personnel reached 24,000, 33,000, and 2,000 respectively; packaging and testing companies have at least 10,000 recruitment needs that cannot be met, and for chip design companies this figure reaches 70,000.

Cultivating high-end talents is a problem that must be solved to further develop the integrated circuit industry. In order to cultivate and retain integrated circuit talents, all aspects from the government, universities to enterprises have begun to use their best efforts.

In January this year, the integrated circuit major officially became a first-level discipline and fell under the interdisciplinary category in my country. The "status" of the integrated circuit major has been significantly improved. Does this mean that the cultivation of chip talents has been accelerated? Zhao Yuanfu, deputy director of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ninth Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, believes that the interdisciplinary disciplines of the integrated circuit major are different from traditional disciplines. It involves the testing, design, packaging and other aspects of integrated circuits. How to run the integrated circuit major well is of great importance to universities. It is said to be a great challenge. On the other hand, how to mobilize the enthusiasm of enterprises and effectively play their role in first-level disciplines requires further discussion.

Judging from the recruitment expansion plans of Xiaomi, OPPO, and VIVO, at least tens of thousands of R&D talents will be needed in the future. In addition to the mobile phone field, Xiaomi is also involved in autonomous driving. Its autonomous driving department is recruiting autonomous driving technology elites on a large scale. This means that the demand for talent will continue to expand and will continue for a long time to come.

It should be noted that as the semiconductor industry enters the "post-Moore era", the future direction of technological development has also attracted much attention. The integration of chip talents with the times will be one of the important factors affecting future industry development. Zhao Yuanfu mentioned that at the school level, schools cannot be biased by enterprises; at the enterprise level, the cultivation of talents cannot be quick and quick. The integrated circuit industry is entering an important node in the post-Moore era, which is also the stage for the development of chip talents.

When the country established the integrated circuit major as a first-level discipline, major schools were also keeping up with the pace of industrial development. Beihang changed the School of Microelectronics into the School of Integrated Circuits. Zhang Yue, deputy dean of the School of Integrated Circuits at Beihang University, mentioned, “This is not just a name change, we are thinking about integrating physics, mathematics, chemistry and other multi-disciplinary content into integrated circuits.” Integrated circuits. The market demand for circuits is a major opportunity and a major challenge. How to build integrated college disciplines under the new form? At the student level, Beihang has changed the graduation requirements for master's and doctoral students from thesis to the development of process equipment and process equipment. Zhang Yue said that (Beihang University) is gradually exploring this process and there is still a lot of work to be done in the future.

Both companies and universities are actively promoting the cultivation of chip talents, but Xu Jun, a professor at the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University, believes that the most ideal way is to keep in touch with companies, strengthen the integration of companies and industries, and provide practical training for college students. platform to be wary of the disconnect between education and scientific research. Xu Wei, an associate professor at Tsinghua University's Institute of Interdisciplinary Information, believes that it is necessary to distinguish how many high-end talents and low-end talents the semiconductor industry needs. The vast majority of integrated circuit students and scientists were just "chip migrant workers" in the early days. Cultivating this group of talents is as important as cultivating top talents. The cultivation of chip talents needs to be carried out in depth and more extensively, rather than focusing on cultivating more than ten or twenty people. Thousands of high-end talents.

At present, the establishment of semiconductor companies is a "Great Leap Forward", and the demand for talents continues to rise. Industry insiders analyze that the talent development of the IC industry will show the following trends: the gap will become long-term, the requirements for talents in the positions will decrease, and the division of labor will become more detailed. , IC companies began to "raise fish" to prepare for talent reserves.

For Xiaomi and OV, talent recruitment will be a protracted battle. In terms of talent reserves, Honor, which has just become independent from Huawei, has obvious advantages over Xiaomi and OV. Honor took away some of Huawei's R&D personnel during the "separation". As of January this year, Honor's R&D talents have reached 4,000, accounting for half of the company's personnel. Honor CEO Zhao Ming said that it is expected to expand to one by the end of this year. Thousands of people. It can be seen that Honor's "talent base" is getting bigger and bigger, and a strong enough "talent base" is the confidence for Honor to hit the high-end market.

Things have always been rare and valuable. In the field of integrated circuits, the annual salary of 500,000 yuan for high-tech talents, who are in short supply, seems to be a salary range recognized by the industry. In addition to mobile phone manufacturers, state-owned enterprises are overcoming the goal of independent and controllable chips and recruiting talents on a large scale, so much so that money-making training courses have appeared in the industry under the guise of "quick-track chip talent". Everyone in the industry points to the huge demand for chip talents. gap.

On the road to self-developed chips, mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi and OV not only need a large number of scientific and technological talents. For this project that requires a large amount of initial capital and a long research and development cycle, after the chip is designed, who will It is an OEM business. How much shipments will be made in the future will be a test for mobile phone manufacturers.