Commerce Dept. Outlines Plans to Fund Cutting-Edge Chip Research
The plans are part of the Biden administration’s effort to reinvigorate semiconductor manufacturing and ensure that the United States has a steady supply of chips necessary to feed its factories and support its national defense. The Commerce Department has been charged with doling out $50 billion to revitalize the industry, including $11 billion devoted to research and development.
The technology center is expected to be central to that effort. Some of its locations would be capable of end-to-end manufacturing of new chip designs, while others would focus on experimenting with new materials and equipment, or with new ways of putting chips together to make them more powerful, Ms. Raimondo said.
Laurie Giandomenico, the vice president and chief acceleration officer of Mitre, a nonprofit organization that operates federally funded research centers, called the $11 billion investment by the United States “pretty significant,” given that the semiconductor industry has in past years spent about $70 billion on research and development globally.
The challenge, she said, would be to ensure that the money was spent to encourage collaborative research to solve the industry’s biggest problems, not the “siloed innovation” now carried out by chip firms that carefully guard their creations from competitors.
“It should be on areas that no one company can solve alone,” she said.
Companies, universities, lawmakers and local governments have been lobbying the administration to set up an outpost of the new organization in their area. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader and an author of the legislation that funded the semiconductor investment, said in a statement Tuesday that he was pushing to make Albany, N.Y., a site for the new organization.
Source: The New York Times
