Korea Semiconductor Workforce Program: 2026 Advanced Talent R&D Funding

Korea Semiconductor Workforce Program: 2026 Advanced Talent R&D Funding

This page is a historical reference for the 2026 Korea Semiconductor Workforce Program, formally listed as 민관공동투자반도체고급인력양성. The 2026 application round is closed. The official IRIS record identifies the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy as the responsible ministry, KEIT as the specialist agency, and the IRIS portal as the application channel. No later application deadline is announced on the official notice pages reviewed for this update.

Do not read the retained deadline as a date on which an applicant can still submit. It remains in the metadata because it is the genuine closing date of the completed round. The historicalReference = true field marks that distinction for the site and for readers.

Verified status and cycle facts

The official IRIS entry is titled 2026년도 반도체 분야 신규 지원대상 연구개발과제 공고. It records the notice as Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy announcement 2026-024, published on 2026-01-13. The portal lists the application period as 2026-01-30 through 2026-02-12. The page labels the submission window as closed, so this is an archive entry rather than an active funding opportunity.

The semiconductor notice is a larger call containing several subprograms. The workforce item is one of those subprograms, not a separate ₩28 billion award. The verified 2026 allocation for 민관공동투자반도체고급인력양성 was ₩4,050 million for nine new projects. A separate annual program summary describes the wider program investment, including continuing projects, as ₩17,332 million, with the 2026 new-project portion shown separately. Those figures should not be combined into a per-consortium promise.

The official program description gives the purpose as supporting company-demand research performed by graduate-level university and research-institute personnel while developing advanced semiconductor talent. The program therefore connects R&D and workforce development. It is not a general scholarship, a short public training course, or a recruitment subsidy for individual applicants.

What the program funded

The 2026 program sat within the semiconductor R&D portfolio and used approved items or RFPs. The official program summary identifies the relevant technical areas as memory semiconductors, system semiconductors, semiconductor process equipment, and semiconductor materials. The detailed item guide attached to the call is the controlling source for the exact research topics, project duration, budget for each item, technical scope, and required research structure.

The annual program summary gives a project-duration range of 33 to 57 months and an average project support figure of about ₩225 million across the program. That average is a planning reference, not a guaranteed award amount. A proposal must use the amount and duration assigned to its selected item. The evaluation panel may adjust the final research budget and content, so a team should not treat the program total or average as an automatic entitlement.

The program’s workforce purpose also matters when reading the technical scope. A technically interesting semiconductor project is not automatically a fit. The proposal needs to show how university or research-institute personnel will conduct the approved research and how the work develops advanced talent. The strongest archive-era interpretation is therefore a research plan with clear technical questions, named researchers, a credible development schedule, and a direct connection between the work and graduate-level capability building.

Eligibility: what was actually stated

The program-specific summary identifies universities and research institutes as the research-performing entities. The broader 2026 semiconductor notice describes eligible lead and joint research institutions using the categories recognised by the Industrial Technology Innovation Promotion Act and the common operating rules for industrial technology R&D. Those categories include companies, universities, research institutions, research associations, business organisations, medical institutions, and other qualifying bodies. The detailed item guide still controls for each individual workforce item.

For this subprogram, applicants should not rely on the old page’s unsupported statement that every project had to include a semiconductor company. The official materials describe company-demand R&D, but the workforce item’s stated research-performing entities are universities and research institutes. A company may have a role where the relevant item and consortium rules allow it, but the page should not promise that a company partner is mandatory unless the selected RFP says so.

A company acting as the lead institution also had to satisfy additional conditions in the common notice: it needed to be a corporation at the application deadline and to hold a recognised corporate research institute before the selection evaluation. The notice also set exclusion rules for participation restrictions, insolvency, tax arrears, debt-default registration, bankruptcy or rehabilitation proceedings, and certain adverse financial conditions. These are screening rules, not substitutes for checking the selected item guide.

The practical fit test for a future round is therefore:

• Is the lead institution a university or research institute, or otherwise expressly accepted by the selected item?
• Does the proposed work match an approved semiconductor item rather than a self-defined topic outside the RFP?
• Can the team name the research leader, participating researchers, institutional roles, and graduate-level talent-development activities?
• Can every participating organisation pass the common eligibility and exclusion checks?
• Can the team prepare the required electronic forms and supporting records before the IRIS cut-off?

How applications were submitted in the closed round

The 2026 notice required online submission through IRIS. The research leader was expected to enter the project information, upload the required materials, and reach the portal’s submission complete state by the deadline. The notice warned that data entry and file upload could take substantial time, that there was no grace period after the cut-off, and that late edits or submissions were not accepted.

The historical submission sequence was:

1. Confirm the selected workforce item and read its attached RFP or item guide. The item guide determines the technical objective, project period, budget, lead-institution type, and any special consortium conditions.
2. Prepare the research-development plan using the official form. The basic plan was uploaded electronically, with the required institutional and researcher information entered in IRIS.
3. Register or confirm the lead institution, researchers, and required identity information in the IRIS environment. New institutional or personnel verification could delay a first-time submission.
4. Collect the required supporting records. The notice listed items such as business registration documentation for applicable for-profit institutions, participation-intent confirmations from research institutions, personal and tax-information consent, research-ethics, integrity, and security pledges, employment certificates, eligibility confirmations, simultaneous-project confirmations, and any applicable corporate research-institute recognition or financial records.
5. Upload every required file in the prescribed format. The notice identified HWP for the research plan and PDF scans for many supporting forms. The exact checklist for a future call could change, so an archive reader must use the new notice rather than copy this list blindly.
6. Have the lead research institution’s responsible researcher submit the completed package through the IRIS business-announcement menu. Keep a saved record of the final submission state and uploaded files for internal audit.

The notice also allowed a fallback to KEIT’s SROME digital R&D platform if IRIS could not accept the application, subject to a separate announcement. That was a contingency in the published procedure, not permission to submit through an arbitrary email address or to send paper documents. The official process stated that offline submission was not required.

Materials a future applicant should prepare early

Because this record describes a closed round, the following is a preparation checklist rather than a live invitation. A future applicant should expect to assemble:

• A research-development plan mapped line by line to the selected semiconductor item.
• A technical work breakdown with milestones, responsibilities, methods, and measurable outputs.
• A researcher and institution roster showing who will perform the work and who will supervise the talent-development component.
• Participation-intent confirmations for the lead and joint research institutions.
• Personal-information and tax-information consent forms where required.
• Research ethics, integrity, security, and compliance pledges.
• Eligibility confirmations and simultaneous-project declarations.
• Corporate research-institute recognition and financial records when the applying institution is a company and the selected rules require them.
• A realistic budget separating personnel, research materials, equipment or facility use, analysis, travel where allowable, and other permitted costs.

The former page treated attachments as an unresolved blocker. The corrected record makes the more useful distinction: the official notice and item guide are the authority, while this page is a concise archive and planning aid. Readers should download the new attachments when a successor call appears and replace each historical checklist item with the new form number and file rule.

Timeline and archive use

The verified 2026 cycle was published on 2026-01-13, opened for submissions on 2026-01-30, and closed on 2026-02-12. The deadline is preserved exactly as the front-matter date because the call had a fixed closing time and was not a rolling intake. The official page also provides the current-cycle attachment set, including the main semiconductor notice, the research-development-plan forms, the applicable rules, the IRIS submission manual, and the item guide for 민관공동투자반도체고급인력양성.

There is no confirmed successor deadline in the official pages checked. That does not prove the program has been cancelled. It means this page must not invent a 2027 date, convert the closed window to rolling, or tell readers that applications are still being accepted. Anyone seeking a new round should search the MOTIE/MOTIR announcement pages, IRIS, and KEIT’s R&D platform for a new notice and then verify the item-specific documents before preparing a proposal.

Official sources

The primary current-cycle record is the 2026 IRIS semiconductor R&D announcement. It contains the ministry notice, the application window, the application link, and the official attachment list. The official MOTIR policy-board page for the semiconductor program is retained as background for the program’s public-private advanced-workforce R&D identity, but it describes the earlier 2025 notice and is not the active 2026 application route.

For a future cycle, start with the new IRIS notice, open the matching item guide, confirm the lead- and joint-institution rules, and only then draft the technical plan and budget. This archive preserves the verified 2026 facts without presenting a closed application window as available.