A new law to strengthen the U.S. Semiconductor industry and keep the country ahead of China in technology is not a realistic goal. The recently passed CHIPS and Science Act commits some $13 billion for research and training in micro electronics. As soon as a trio of federal agencies announce their plans, universities are forming large coalitions with companies and local governments to compete for the money.
The professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is involved with several such partnerships.
A National Semiconductor Technology Center and a national advanced packaging manufacturing program will be created by the act over the next five years. The microelectronics commons is a national network of university laboratories to develop prototypes for the next generation of chip technologies.
Philip Wong, an electrical engineer at Stanford University, says that the initiatives are aimed at the lack of lab-to-Fab facilities. The National Science Foundation is getting $200 million over the next five years for education and workforce training.
According to Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the research and training is just as important as the fabrication plants. She says the new law will allow for the next generation of chip technologies.
A report due out this month will recommend that NSTC spend 30% to 50% of its budget on fundamental research in microelectronics, from new materials and energy efficient computing to improved security and health care applications. Bill Dally, senior vice president for research at NVIDIA, said that a skilled workforce is a prerequisite for everything. We need to do a lot of things to keep our leadership in Semiconductor.
Two large industry-academic-government partnerships are thought to be the leading contender for NSTC: the American Semiconductor Innovation Coalition (ASIC), spearheaded by IBM and New York's AlbanyNanotech Complex, and the Semiconductor Alliance, which features Intel, Micron, and the MITRE Corporation. Both groups have some of the best academics in the world. The Georgia Institute of Technology is a member of the Alliance. Although New York, Virginia, and Texas politicians have proposed their states as hosts, they are more likely to be a network of existing facilities than a single edifice.
The center wants to give researchers access to a kind of standard workbench to help them lower the cost of testing and prototyping new chip technologies. startup companies would be supported by NSTC The center would address the need for additional talent at all levels by funding hundreds of new faculty positions, thousands of scholarships, and a uniform curriculum in microelectronics with hands-on training.
Only a few universities are capable of hosting that training. A white paper by del Alamo and his colleagues estimated that it would cost $80 million to upgrade the university's lab to handle 200 millimeter wafers. The university would need $80 million a year in research grants to operate the lab. Del Alamo says that that doesn't rule out many institutions. Tsu-Jae King Liu is the dean of engineering at UC Berkeley and he says that the country won't be able to fill the 42,000 new jobs that will be created by the CHIPS Act.
The creation of the American Semiconductor Academy was spearheaded by KingLiu.
Microelectronics education She is working with the SEMI Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the industry's trade association, to get funding for that vision.
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