WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday outlined plans to advance research into the kind of cutting-edge microchips needed to power computers, cars and other devices, and said it would set up a new national organization with sites in different parts of the world establish the United States.
The Commerce Department, which is responsible for the government’s efforts to revitalize America’s chip industry, said its new National Semiconductor Technology Center will bring together companies, universities and others to collaborate on next-generation chip technology. The organization would include a number of research centres, locations yet to be chosen, which should be operational by the end of this year.
The organization would help “reclaim America’s leadership in research and development and the technologies of the future, and most importantly, ensure that we remain there for decades to come,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a briefing on Monday.
“It’s a place where industry and academia, startups and investors can come together to solve the biggest and biggest challenges and set priorities,” she added.
The plans are part of the Biden administration’s effort to revive semiconductor manufacturing and ensure the United States has a steady supply of chips needed to power its factories and support its national defenses. The Commerce Department has been accused of spending $50 billion to revitalize the industry, including $11 billion on research and development.
The technology center should be the focal point. Some of its sites would be able to end-to-end manufacture of new chip designs, while others would focus on experimenting with new materials and devices, or new ways of assembling chips to make them more powerful, Ms. Raimondo said.
Laurie Giandomenico, vice president and chief acceleration officer of MITER, a nonprofit organization that operates federally funded research centers, called the US $11 billion investment “quite significant” given that the semiconductor industry has grown about 70 Billions of dollars have been spent on research and development worldwide.
The challenge, she said, is making sure the money is spent to encourage collaborative research to solve the industry’s biggest problems, rather than the “siloed innovation” that’s now being done by chip companies that carefully craft their creations protect against competitors.
“These should be areas that no company can solve on its own,” she said.
Businesses, universities, legislators and local governments have been lobbying the government to set up a field office for the new organization in their area. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader and author of the legislation that funded the semiconductor investment, said in a statement Tuesday that he is pushing to make Albany, NY a location for the new organization.
“Albany is poised to serve as the NSTC’s premier innovation center,” he said.
In the briefing, Ms. Raimondo stressed that the organization would be an independent “trusted” actor, with board members appointed by a separate selection committee and strict controls to protect intellectual property.
One of the organization’s main goals, Ms. Raimondo said, is to make it easier for start-ups and other newcomers to develop and commercialize new chip technologies, and to make them more cost-effective.
“We aim to halve the projected cost of moving a new chip from concept to commercialization over the next decade,” she said.
Chris Miller, author of “Chip War,” which chronicles the evolution of the industry, said it’s comparatively easy for a researcher to come up with a new idea for a chip in a lab. However, given the high cost of making chips, researchers can find it difficult to manufacture their inventions.
According to analysts, an advanced chip that can contain tens of billions of transistors can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. The latest systems for defining the tiniest circuits on wafers cost more than $100 million each, while the new factories, dubbed “fabs,” that manufacture advanced chips can cost $10 billion to $20 billion.
“The big fabs are interested in making 100 million chips for an iPhone, not 10 chips for a professor at MIT,” Mr. Miller said.
Venture capitalists are also often reluctant to invest in chip startups because they require more initial funding than other types of tech companies and more time to earn a return on that investment.
To address some of these issues, the government’s technology center will set up an investment fund to support start-ups and provide manufacturing facilities for small players to experiment with new technologies.
“I see a world where the US can actually revive this microelectronics industry because we could cut the cost of a chip startup by a factor of five to ten,” said Gilman Louie, technology investor and chief executive officer of a nonprofit investment organization called America’s Frontier Fund.
The center’s research priorities are set to be refined in the coming months. However, the Commerce Department identified several areas it would focus on, including advancing the technology to analyze the microscopic components of chips and setting technical standards for new types of chip packaging.
As progress in pressing smaller and smaller transistors onto each piece of silicon slows, many companies are now breaking down large products into smaller “chiplets” that are placed side by side or stacked on top of each other.
The Commerce Department said setting new standards for these practices would pave the way for the creation of marketplaces where companies can mix and match new products using chiplets from multiple vendors.