Most of the $280 billion in the new law to boost America’s semiconductor industry and keep the country ahead of China in technology is a 5-year promise, not reality. Along with the aspirational spending, however, the recently passed Chip and Science Act earmarked roughly $13 billion for research and training in microelectronics. And America’s universities are now forming grand coalitions with businesses and local governments to be ready to compete for the money once the trio of federal agencies announce their plans.
“No sane university with a strong interest in microelectronics is addressing this,” says Jesús del Alamo, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is involved in several such partnerships. The law, signed into law on August 9, brings $11 billion over 5 years to the US Department of Commerce to create the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) and the National Advanced Packaging Program. Another $2 billion will go to the Department of Defense (DOD) microelectronics commons, a national network of university laboratories to develop prototypes for the next generation of semiconductor technologies.
Both initiatives “target the lack of lab-to-factory facilities,” referring to university labs developing new technologies to be incorporated into semiconductor factories, or factories, says Philip Wong, an electrical engineer at Stanford University who leads its nanofabrication . center. In addition, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is raising $200 million over 5 years to educate and train the microelectronics workforce.
“Research and training are just as important as storyboards, although they don’t get nearly as much attention,” says Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker AMD and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). He calls the new law “a once-in-a-generation … opportunity to fill the pipeline with the next generation of semiconductor technology.”
The PCAST report, due out this month, will recommend that the NSTC spend 30 to 50% of its budget on basic research in a wide range of areas of microelectronics, from new materials and energy-efficient computing to improved applications in security and healthcare. And “a skilled workforce is a prerequisite for everything,” says PCAST member Bill Dally, senior vice president of research at NVIDIA. “There are a lot of things we need to do to maintain leadership in semiconductors, and they all require talented people.”
Two major industry-academia-government partnerships are considered the main contenders for the NSTC: the American Semiconductor Innovation Coalition (ASIC), led by IBM and New York’s Albany Nanotech Complex; and the Semiconductor Alliance, which includes Intel, Micron, and MITER Corporation. Both groups boast a roster of academic heavyweights. MIT, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Purdue University are members of ASIC, while Stanford and the University of California (UC), Berkeley, are closely associated with the alliance. Although politicians from New York, Virginia and Texas have proposed their states as hosts, insiders say the center will be a network of existing facilities spread across the country rather than a single building.
The center’s to-do list includes funding multimillion-dollar upgrades to existing fab labs at dozens of universities and giving researchers access to a sort of standard workbench to reduce the cost of testing and prototyping new chip technologies. The NSTC would also support start-up companies that want to commercialize these technologies. In addition, the center would address the need for additional talent at all levels by funding hundreds of new faculty positions, thousands of scholarships, a unified curriculum in microelectronics with hands-on training, and outreach to middle and high school students.
Only a small number of universities have the capacity to provide this training. A white paper published last year by del Alamo and his colleagues estimated that upgrading the university’s fab lab to process 200-millimeter wafers, the size that has become standard in advanced fabs, would cost $80 million. The university would then need $80 million a year in research grants to operate the lab, which could train about 500 graduate students and postdocs. That rules out many institutions, says del Alamo. Even upgrading the select group of universities that remain would still fall far short of filling the country with the 42,000 new semiconductor jobs the CHIPS Act is expected to create, says Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean of engineering at UC Berkeley.
So last year, King Liu spearheaded the creation of the American Semiconductor Academy (ASA), a national network for microelectronic education. She partnered with the SEMI Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the industry trade association, to seek CHIPS funding from the DOD and NSF to make this vision a reality.
Attracting American students to microelectronics has become a challenge over the past 30 years as semiconductor work has moved overseas and Google and other American companies have shelled out money for recent graduates to write software instead of making devices, says Sanjay Banerjee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. engineer and head of the Microelectronics Research Center at the University of Texas (UT), Austin. UT is part of a consortium seeking some DOD funding to reverse this trend.
Banerjee says the DOD proposal will build on a long-term NSF-funded program called the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which provides $84 million over 5 years to 16 universities. A DOD grant would be like “an NNCI deployment on steroids,” he says. “It will give us better tools, more staff and facilities that are more relevant to the industry.”
The CHIPS legislation aims to expand research and education opportunities both geographically and by race/ethnicity. This will require the participation of multiple institutions that are not on the east and west coasts of the country, as well as those that serve large numbers of students from groups historically underrepresented in science and engineering. These include the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which as a group rank low on the list of institutions that receive federal research dollars.
Consortia competing for funding must make room for these institutions, says electrical engineer Michel Kornegay of Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore. “People talk generally about equity and inclusion,” says Kornegay, a member of the ASA network. “But they don’t specify how they plan to do it and whether the people who are going to implement those plans have a track record of success.” The influx of CHIPS money could even widen the gap between the haves and have-nots if these issues are not addressed, warns Patricia Mead, dean of engineering at Norfolk State University, an HBCU. “In America, the rich will always get richer,” he says. “So you need strong leadership that is really committed to expanding the scope of microelectronics training in this country.”
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