And they even know that it can cost $280 billion. But so far the government is giving much less.
Recently law passed in the USA about chips” allocates about 13 billion dollars for research and training of specialists in the field of microelectronics, reports Science.
Recent events on the planet, in particular, China's pursuit of hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region< /strong> and its rapid technological development, made the US worry about the production of microprocessors at home.
Also read: The confrontation between the US and the PRC: the semi-cold semi-war of semiconductors
Attracting American students to microelectronics has become a challenge over the past 30 years as jobs in the semiconductor industry have moved overseas and Google and other American companies have invested in recent graduates to write software rather than build devices.
< p>U.S. universities are currently forming coalitions with companies and local governments to be ready to fight for investment.
The law, signed into law on August 9, will direct $11 billion over 5 years to the US Department of Commerce to establish the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC). Another two billion dollars will go to the Department of Defense to create a national network of university laboratories to develop prototypes of next-generation semiconductor technologies.
In addition, the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocates $200 million over 5 years for education and training in field of microelectronics.
The main contenders for NSTC are two large partnerships between industry, academia and government. These are: 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 weightlifters.
The center's to-do list includes funding multimillion-dollar upgrades to existing manufacturing labs at dozens of universities and giving researchers access to a kind of single desktop to lower the cost of testing and prototyping new chip technologies.
NSTC is also designed to meet the need for additional talent. at all levels, funding the creation of hundreds of new faculty positions, thousands of scholarships, a unified microelectronics curriculum with hands-on learning and outreach to middle and high school students.
However, only a small number of universities have the capacity to provide the kind of training that would prevent them from filling the 42,000 new semiconductor jobs that the chip law is expected to create, says Tsu-Je King Liu, dean of UC Berkeley's engineering department.< /p>
So last year, Liu led the creation of the American Semiconductor Academy (ASA), a national network for microelectronics education. It teamed up with the SEMI Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the industry trade association, to secure CHIPS funding from the US Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.
Also read: Nvidia, AMD banned from selling top AI chips in US China – Reuters
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