It is said that at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a government-funded research institution leading national research and development (R&D) in the semiconductor field, receiving 100 million won in performance-based compensation is as difficult as plucking a star from the sky. The primary source of compensation, technology licensing revenue, totals 60 billion won per year, and after subtracting the institution's share, researchers split the remaining half. By simple calculation, the top 10% of high performers—200 to 300 people—receive an average of just over 100 million won per person. Even among those with master's and doctoral degrees, only a select few can receive compensation in the hundreds of millions after fierce competition.
Moreover, there is a "paradox" that serves as a source of frustration: elite researchers with doctorates from top U.S. universities are actually at a disadvantage in this competition. These individuals tend to conduct deep, focused research on uncommercializable future foundational technologies, making it harder for them to generate technology licensing fees compared to those working on relatively easier-to-apply industrial technologies.
For these researchers, the massive bonus parties at Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix (000660) are stories from another world. SK Hynix recently paid employee bonuses equivalent to 1.5 times last year's annual salary. Samsung Electronics' semiconductor division promised even greater compensation to prevent employee attrition. Even that was not enough to satisfy the labor union, which has threatened a general strike and demanded more. Starting salaries for ETRI's doctoral-level researchers are also only 60–70% of what major corporations offer.
These two contrasting cases illustrate the reality of widening polarization in the treatment of semiconductor talent. Of course, not everyone can expect compensation on par with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which have risen to the ranks of global big tech. However, without improvements in compensation, institutions across industry, academia, and research will inevitably become targets of brain drain. This is because the global war for semiconductor talent is intensifying. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently went so far as to display a Korean flag on social media while sending love calls to Korean talent. Competing big tech firms such as Nvidia and Meta are also attempting to recruit with extraordinary offers of annual salaries in the hundreds of millions of won.
As full-scale investment by Nvidia and others intensifies competition in future core technologies such as photonic semiconductors, spintronic semiconductors, and compound semiconductors, the role of researchers at government-funded research institutes, universities, and other industry-academia-research institutions conducting related R&D is also growing. Without them, the future semiconductor ecosystem cannot be assured.