The US federal government’s investment in semiconductor production and innovation is gathering pace, as the bodies established by the CHIPS & Science Act of 2022 begin to ramp up.
The message was reinforced in recent days by two institutional leaders in the space, who spoke on the record about progress and about plans from here.
Jay Lewis is Director of the CHIPS for America NSTC Program and Deirdre Hanford is the very recently appointed CEO of Natcast, which is the non-profit organization charged with operating the NSTC once established. Natcast is short for the National Center for the Advancement of Semiconductor Technology (Natcast), while the NSTC is the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), which will drive design and prototyping projects and community-building in the years ahead.
The pair noted that CHIPS for America, created by the CHIPS Act, has two main arms to it: $39bn earmarked for US production investments and $11bn for R&D.
“The overarching aim is to maintain US leadership in chips design and to grow manufacturing – and to do that we need to foster a new approach,” said Lewis. “What the NSTC is focused on is providing leadership and community-building and tools to bridge the gap between commercial operators and the public sector on R&D.”
The idea from here, as federally subsidised semiconductor fab projects continue to move ahead across the US, is to test new ideas in parallel and bring them to market much more quickly. This is something that is currently hard to do commercially in hardware, with speedy design, development and prototyping, as well as production, all posing their own challenges.
“In short, the NSTC is doing some things government has not done before. Working as a public–private consortium, it will tie together four programs – the NSTC, the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP), Manufacturing USA, and CHIPS Metrology – with the NSTC, through Natcast, taking the lead in ensuring a joined-up approach,” said Lewis.
This new approach should create a context that accelerates chips and electronics innovation in the US, and spin out new manufacturing opportunities faster than before, said Hanford.
“Let me clarify our three connected NSTC missions at Natcast,” she continued.
“The first is workforce development. We need to develop and grow a new generation of engineers and researchers and technicians. If you think about the fabs coming online, we must help build our technical capability alongside that. And there are different missions under this umbrella. Building the technicians capability is regional in its focus, while building up the engineers and researchers is broadly a national program.”
The second pillar of the NSTC vision is to lower the cost of innovation and design and prototyping, said Hanford. This will happen initially through setting up a design enablement gateway – a cloud-enabled platform – to help companies and students on their design tasks. It will include – and develop – tools to help reduce some of the toil that’s generally part of getting into a chip design process. And once a design is finished it will support building it out.
“We are talking here about common tools and aggregating services,” said Hanford.
There will also be support through a venture fund to help small start-ups at the pre-seed stage to move forward.
A final piece in the mission spelled out by Hanford is for the NSTC to bring together research across all the different stakeholders involved, by building out a joined up community of research collaborators.
Lewis described the work that’s going in as a national security imperative that needs to happen fast and to be lasting.
For the industrial gas industry, opportunities will flow from all aspects of this broad-based initiative, but there is also an opportunity to be part of the community that is building.
“We need all stakeholders to be hyper-connected,” said Lewis in closing.
You can get engaged by signing up for email updates at CHIPS.gov and at Natcast.org.
