On May 14, 2026, Ohashi Takumi joined the panel session "Designing the Future in the World of Semiconductors — Skills Required and Careers Expanding" at LSI and Systems Workshop 2026 (LSI-WS 2026), hosted by IEICE ICD at Takeda Hall, The University of Tokyo.
Moderated by Prof. Makoto Ikeda (The University of Tokyo), the panel brought together Prof. Hiroshi Inoue (Kyushu University), Kazuyuki Irie (Global Unichip Japan), Shun Oshima (Hitachi), Kazumi Kijima (Rapidus), and Seiichiro Horiike (Alchip Technologies), together with Ohashi Takumi from our lab (Institute of Science Tokyo) as panelists. The session targeted students, early-career researchers and engineers, and professionals considering a move into semiconductors via career change or reskilling — exploring "what kind of future can be drawn in the world of semiconductors" from multiple angles.
Position talks and three discussion themes
After two-minute position talks from each panelist, the discussion advanced through three themes:
- What kinds of work exist in the semiconductor industry? — diverse roles and places where professionals can thrive across disciplines
- How to enter and grow? — entry points and growth paths for new graduates, junior engineers, career changers, and reskillers
- What careers and futures can be drawn in the semiconductor world? — the skills required, talent mobility, and the industry outlook
In the final theme, Ohashi laid out the following argument about the semiconductor talent of the future.
The "semiconductor design orchestrator"
Japan's nominal GDP is on the order of ¥600 trillion, yet domestic semiconductor sales were only about ¥5 trillion as of 2020 (the baseline cited in METI's Semiconductor and Digital Industry Strategy). METI aims to grow this to over ¥15 trillion by 2030 and ¥40 trillion by 2040, and Rapidus and other advanced-manufacturing ventures are being built in that policy context.
But simply expanding manufacturing capacity — and staying a low-margin contract foundry — makes those targets hard to reach. The first step is to couple high-value design with manufacturing. Even then, chips themselves remain a small share of GDP. The real growth lies in deliberately stepping into the vastly larger industrial domains beyond chips — mobility, healthcare, agriculture, energy, social infrastructure — and translating the societal issues surfacing there into semiconductor design.
Ohashi called this kind of person a "semiconductor design orchestrator" — someone who possesses the technical skill to design semiconductors, while also widening their view to the broader socio-technical system, designing questions across industries, and bringing stakeholders along to implementation.
Closing
At our lab, we pursue research and talent development centered on transition design — designing the interfaces between technology and society. Semiconductors are a foundational technology embedded across every domain of society, and the design of their implementation outlets is becoming an increasingly pressing question. We will continue to develop the conversations from this panel in our co-creation across industry and academia.