Photo/Illutration Trainees study the semiconductor manufacturing process at Kyushu Institute of Technology’s Center for Microelectronic Systems in Iizuka, Fukuoka Prefecture. Part of the people’s faces have been deliberately blurred for privacy reasons. (Yasuaki Oshika)

IIZUKA, Fukuoka Prefecture--Businesses across Japan plugged into manufacturing semiconductors have been dispatching a steady flow of trainees to a research center here on the Iizuka Campus of the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech).

The Center for Microelectronic Systems (CMS), as the academic facility is called, provides a rare opportunity for utilizing actual manufacturing equipment to study all stages of the chipmaking process.

That manufacturing process includes everything from designing to inspection, at a time when the process has been fractionalized in the industry.

The city, previously a coal-mining town, has become a draw for a flood of cutting-edge semiconductor technology trainees.

A recent visitor to the site changed into work clothes, donned gloves, a face mask and a pair of purpose-designed shoes and passed through an air shower before entering a clean room lined with as many as 90 devices of all sizes.

“We offer training in all processing stages, which involves watching and touching the real thing,” said Kazuyuki Nakamura, a professor and head of the CMS. “Our training provides an overall perspective of the entire process instead of just a small fraction of it.”

Nakamura, who previously worked for NEC Corp., had an opportunity, as a new hire of the electronics giant, to experience the entire chipmaking process during a training session.

He said that the experience proved useful for his subsequent research and development work.

Nowadays, however, semiconductor manufacturing has been fractionalized into separate steps, such as designing, cleaning, coating, exposure, cutting and inspection in sequential order.

This fractionalizing has made it difficult to command an all-encompassing perspective of the entire picture.

In addition, manufacturing appliances have been turning increasingly into black boxes, making it difficult to tell what is happening inside the devices.

Many of the apparatuses available at the Kyutech CMS, which opened in 1994, are old-fashioned, which allows their users to have a firsthand experience of the processing steps by touching and seeing things directly with their hands and eyes.

The CMS started offering a program for hosting trainees in fiscal 2018, whereupon major chipmakers Kioxia Corp. and Sony Group Corp. drew on the program to train their new hires. Appliance makers and raw materials manufacturers followed suit.

Banks that extend loans and developers that build plants have also participated in the training course amid the recent boom in the semiconductor industry.

A delegation of Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) officials, including Chairman Masakazu Tokura, also came to tour the site in March.

Ten new hires of Rapidus Corp., which plans to begin manufacturing state-of-the-art semiconductors, also underwent the training here in April.

The training course, which covers all processing steps in four days, can be taken online as an option as well. The number of course participants surged from only 50 or so in fiscal 2021 to 700 in fiscal 2023.

Course fees and other revenue are now big enough to cover the CMS’s operating expenses of about 100 million yen ($635,000).

“Our center is turning into an institution for developing leading-edge personnel,” Nakamura said. “People are coming down here to Iizuka from all corners of Japan.”

CMS officials said they plan to increase the annual number of the trainees they host to 2,100 in the years to come.