Speaking at a ceremony last week to mark the tenth birthday of the R&D center, Duong Minh Tam, deputy head of the SHTP’s management board, said the microchip and semiconductor laboratory under the center had finished all technology steps in making the diode named Schottky, and was ready to produce the product en masse.

Diode Schottky is the fruit of cooperation between the R&D center and HCMC-based United Vietnam Photonic Company Ltd (UPV Co., Ltd), a locally-owned enterprise.

Diode is a semiconductor component which is used in almost all of household electric appliances and other electric devices. It is to protect the electric engines, transformers and other power transmission equipments such as the electromagnet coil from the current transition, said Tam.

The component is mainly imported from Japan, South Korea and China for local use, and diode Schottky of SHTP is the first one of Vietnam.

The University of Hong Kong recently conducted a test on diode Schottky and concluded that the product is good enough to compete with others on the market.

Nguyen Viet The, head of the research team that creates the diode, said two customers from Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China have paced orders with the R&D center to buy large amounts of its diode Schottky.

“We have concluded negotiations on trading the product and now only wait for the clients to sign contracts, which is set to happen within this month,” said The.

A company specializing in producing semiconductor components from Taiwan has also worked with the center to buy diode Schottky.

Although developed countries such as Japan, South Korea and the U.S. have skipped the diode and replace it with more modern two-terminal electronic components like chip and microcontrollers, diode is still popular for many types of electric devices, and the R&D center and its partner still have chance to develop, he said.

Next month, the center and United Vietnam Photonic Company Ltd will produce its first batch of diode with an estimated amount of around 50 wafers (around 105,000 diodes) at the price of US$100 per wafer.

They are also planning to raise its monthly capacity to 2,000 wafers next month, around 10,000 wafers by September, and up to 40,000 wafers next year.

To realize that goal, United Vietnam Photonic Company Ltd. is planning to build a factory at SHTP with an investment of around US$38 million, The said.

The R&D center of SHTP now has five laboratories, specializing in semiconductor, nanotechnology, electromechanical technology, information technology, and biotechnology.