[photopress:Paul_Otellini.jpg,full,alignright]Intel has agreed with the port city of Dalian to set-up a college for the study of semiconductors. This is the first large-scale training base sponsored by the computer chip giant in China.
It will not be inexpensive. The investment will by RMB348 (US$44.6 million) and the result will be part of the Dalian University of Technology. The idea is to have a college which is China’s top training center for professionals involved in integrated circuitry and is expected to open in August 2008. For Intel this is a win situation. It gets itself a lot of points for good citizenship; it ensures a future supply of well-trained engineers.
Wee Theng Tan, president of Intel China, said Intel will donate an eight-inch chip assembly line to the college and help train teachers and develop the curriculum.
In a letter, China’s Ministry of Education praised Intel’s contribution as ‘exemplary’ which is a fair summary.
The school, covering 10,000 square meters, will be located in a high-tech zone north of Dalian’s city proper, close to Intel’s first full factory in Asia, a US$2.5 billion plant that is to produce 300-millimeter integrated wafers using 90-nanometer technology when it becomes operational in the first half of 2010.
Paul Otellini, Intel’s president and chief executive officer, seen above with a large wafer who announced the project in Beijing, said the new project will make Intel ‘one of the largest foreign investors in China’ and raise its total investment in the country to nearly US$4 billion.
The city government estimates the new plant will provide about 1,700 jobs at the plant and the economic spin offs it creates in training, logistics and other services, will be worth RMB120 billion (US$15.4 billion).
Intel already has assembly and test operations in the eastern municipality of Shanghai and Chengdu in the southwest.
Source: Xinhuanet