A South Korean university is launching a new department in cooperation with Samsung Electronics to nurture future talent in the field of system chips.

Yonsei University said Thursday it would open a system chip engineering department starting from the class of 2021, in partnership with Samsung Electronics. The undergraduate program, funded by South Korea’s biggest chipmaker, is designed to educate future talent under the condition that all students will be hired by the company as soon as they graduate. 

The new department will have 50 students each year, and they will all be granted scholarships from Samsung Electronics, according to the university’s plan reported to the Education Ministry.

Yonsei and Samsung will review further plans of setting up follow-up courses at graduate schools, it added. Other chipmakers, including SK hynix, are reportedly in talks to launch system chip engineering programs at Seoul National University and KAIST.

These new programs specializing in system chip development come amid a growing need for chipmakers to expand their presence in the non-memory market. Samsung and SK hynix are respectively the largest and second-largest memory chipmakers in the world, but they have an insignificant presence in the non-memory market, which accounts for 70 percent of the chip business.

The announcement has drawn mixed reactions. Some support the idea of resolving the chronic shortage of experts in the semiconductor field, while others have raised concerns over academia losing its independence from corporate control.

By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)