At EE Times Taiwan’s iTechCon conference, a panel discussion with industry experts and government officials identified talent as a major challenge to Taiwan’s opportunity in AI. David Wang (Source: AMD) Taiwanese companies are ready to capture more of the design and architectural value, over and above manufacturing, David Wang, senior VP of GPU technologies and engineering at AMD, told EE Times in an exclusive interview after the panel discussion. “I certainly hope so,” Wang said. “But it will take collaboration between the public and private sectors, because you have to develop people with more systems and software capabilities.” Talent is a chicken-and-egg situation, since students will continue to choose other fields without intervention, Wang said. “[If] you don’t have students, you don’t have talent; you can’t really expand beyond hardware,” he said. “But if you don’t have those industries, you can’t have people develop their talent either. It will be challenging to break that loop unless public and private sectors step in to proactively do something.” Advanced packaging Taiwan’s next big opportunity is in advanced packaging as AI expands at rack scale, Wang said, along with networking and silicon photonics. Physical AI is also a huge opportunity since it requires the integration of many disciplines, he added. “There’s a chip, there’s firmware, there’s software, there’s a system—they may not be complex, but Taiwan is known to collaborate and move fast and be very agile, so that’s how it would fit in well with Taiwan’s ecosystem,” he said. The AI PC is another huge opportunity, since Taiwan is already the center of the PC ecosystem, Wang said. “I certainly believe, as we move into physical AI, it’s a pretty good opportunity to replicate [the PC] model,” he said. “However, it needs standards and open standards. Because Taiwan doesn’t have many large companies… The way [smaller companies] can really thrive is to be part of open ecosystems with open standards, so that everybody can participate, everybody can play, and everybody can win.” Ecosystem and culture International companies rely on Taiwan’s ecosystems already because of the country’s hardworking and collaborative culture, Wang said. “You can replicate tools, you can replicate processes, [and] it’s very hard to replicate culture,” he said. “The diligent nature of how they treat work, how they treat customers and customer priorities, I think that is very, very hard to replicate.” AMD announced $10 billion of investment in Taiwan’s ecosystem earlier this year. This funding will primarily support advanced packaging, Wang said, and advanced substrate capacity, working with AMD’s Taiwanese partners including OSAT ASE, its packaging and test subsidiary SPIL, and packaging company PTI (Powertech). “We also expanded our planning horizon, since planning for next year is no longer sufficient,” he said. “Our planning horizon is multiple years in advance, so we want to make sure the capacity is enough, because we believe we’re still in an early innings of AI growth.” Advanced packaging is crucial to AMD’s plans. Wang pointed out that AMD led the transition to chiplets and to 3D stacking. “In order to do this sort of thing, we have to plan at the architecture level; it can’t be an afterthought,” he said. “We work very closely with our suppliers, particularly TSMC, almost jointly developing those technologies.” This article was originally published on EE Times . Sally Ward-Foxton covers AI for EETimes.com and EETimes Europe magazine. Sally has spent the last 18 years writing about the electronics industry from London. She has written for Electronic Design, ECN, Electronic Specifier: Design, Components in Electronics, and many more news publications. She holds a Masters’ degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cambridge. The post Taiwan’s AI Expansion Hinges on Systems Talent and Advanced Packaging appeared first on EE Times Asia .