Located in the center of South Korea, Daejeon is the country’s second-fastest-growing city—growth partly engineered by the state. Twelve years ago in a bid to decentralize Seoul, the sprawling capital, the government shifted a huge chunk of its bureaucracy to this city, bringing thousands of new workers and their families.
Government intervention also drove the construction of one of Daejeon’s most famous high-tech landmarks: the National NanoFab Center.
Financing for the $220-million nanotechnology research center—the largest of six such centers across South Korea—comes from the local government and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. South Korea’s top science university, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or Kaist, runs it and provides its staff and students.
The center’s aims include supporting South Korea’s industrialization plans and training top scientists and educators to work in industry and academe.
As in Japan, the government here plays a vitally important role in promoting economic growth in new areas. First came basic industries, then electric devices, then electronics and cars. Now the government is supporting research and development in advanced materials and in technologies like nanotechnology in partnership with private industry.
The aim is to nurture key domestic industries until they are strong enough to compete internationally. The role of the NanoFab Center, according to Hee Chul Lee, its director, is to “offer a bridge for cooperating between university, research institute, and industry.”
Blurring Public and Private
Such blurring of public and private, and of education and research, is typical of Korean higher-education efforts. Kaist donated land and the building, and both governments paid for the 183,000 square-foot center, which opened in 2005. Much of its income comes from providing fabrication and other services to users like the consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics and startups.
Samsung in turn sponsors a course at Kaist, teaching microchip know-how to students who may one day be employees: Roughly a quarter of all researchers at Samsung Electronics are Kaist graduates.
“The Korean government takes a much more active role in planning and directing research than the U.S. government,” says Professor Jung H. Shin, head of Kaist’s Graduate School of Nanoscience & Technology, set up last year. “Long-term research has to be led by the government—industry can’t do it because they’re in the business of making money.”
Nanotechnology, the engineering of molecular-scale materials, is one of several core technologies selected for a government-led push.
The Daejeon center is considered a key cog in the country’s nanotechnology-development plan, and in overall strategies for national economic growth. Mr. Lee predicts a global market worth $1.4-trillion by 2014.
In 2006 the center claimed a first when it made the world’s smallest transistor. The following year it developed the world’s smallest nonvolatile flash memory device (meaning data are not lost when power is switched off). And in 2008 it pioneered a new unified random-access memory, which reduces production costs and boosts memory capacity.
Kaist’s nanotechnology graduate school recently won financing from the government’s World Class University Project, a long-term strategy to improve the quality of research at South Korean universities.
The school used it to lure David Helfman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy, from the University of Miami. He has since accepted a full professorship.
“I think the research done here will be as good as anywhere the world,” he says. “The level of science is extremely high.”
