The CHIPS and Science Act invests in American semiconductor research, development, and production. Maryland engineers are positioned to build a lasting legacy in semiconductor manufacturing—explore their impact.
Assistant Professor Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo holds a semiconductor chip for testing active materials in integrated photonic circuits.
Story by Spoorthy Raman | Photographs by Max Franz
Like gravity or air, it permeates every aspect of our lives, yet we barely notice its presence.
Thinner than the human hair but the ‘brain’ behind all our electronics—from smartphones to cars to large data centers to satellites—the semiconductor chip is ubiquitous: The average U.S. household has nearly 17 electronic devices with such chips connected to the Internet.
Society’s reliance on semiconductors is only growing:
“Cutting-edge semiconductors have created a digital world that we rely on for almost everything,” says Samuel Graham, Jr., dean of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. “Could we survive without the most advanced microelectronics? Yes, we could—but it’d greatly impact the way our society functions and the pace at which we innovate.”
The first integrated circuit, the building blocks of today’s chips, was invented in the U.S. at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. Until the 1980s, the U.S. designed and manufactured more than half of the world’s semiconductor chips. While the U.S. maintains its lead in semiconductor design today, its manufacturing share has consistently plunged—in the last two decades, drawn by financial incentives, their proximity to raw materials, and availability of skilled workforce, U.S. chip manufacturing has mainly moved to Southeast Asia.
“We in the United States consume billions of semiconductors, using them in our cars, satellites, defense equipment, and more, but we only control 3% of the packaging and less than 10% of the manufacturing,” says Professor Ankur Srivastava, director of the Clark School’s Institute for Systems Research. “It is a bad business model.”
In August 2022, the U.S. passed what Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other leaders described as the “once-in-a-generation” bipartisan Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act to address chip shortages and the lack of multi-billion-dollar fabrication plants, or ‘fabs,’ to “boost American semiconductor research, development, and production.”
The act earmarks funding for companies to build and expand their fab facilities in the U.S., for research and development programs related to semiconductor manufacturing and packaging, and to establish a network of university-based research centers focused on microelectronics, communications, and defense-related semiconductor technologies and workforce training.
“The CHIPS and Science Act is a large and much-needed investment by the United States,” Graham says of the scale of investments. “It will hopefully enable us to produce more advanced semiconductors domestically, so we don’t need to rely on international supply chains.”
Although the act focuses on semiconductor manufacturing, the investment also benefits research and manufacturing of tiny sensors, actuators, and photoelectronic devices that use the same fabs.
The ripple effect on the economy would have a big impact on the semiconductor packaging industry, its suppliers, transporters, engineers, and other staff, explains Professor Reza Ghodssi, Herbert Rabin Distinguished Chair in Engineering and executive director of research and innovation at UMD’s MATRIX Lab: “The CHIPS and Science Act isn’t just about the big semiconductor manufacturers or related organizations; there are cascading impacts of this investment that benefit other areas of microelectronics, such as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), sensors, microsystems, nanotechnology, and bioelectronics.”
Boasting expertise across the spectrum of semiconductor manufacturing, the Clark School is leveraging new funding and partnership opportunities to advance next-gen semiconductor research underway in its laboratories.
“The University of Maryland has clear leadership in technological areas including design tools, packaging, lifecycle engineering, and thermal management,” Graham says. “Maryland Engineering brings this expertise to the table to address society’s larger challenges.”
Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo’s research combines photonics and electronics to create new materials that can be controlled by light instead of electric current. “Finding better semiconductors and alternative functional materials is necessary, especially to replace those raw materials used today, which can be hard to mine and source,” says Ríos Ocampo, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering who is working on a class of new materials for photoelectronics, called phase-change materials, that can be used to create efficient devices with better memories, capable of retaining information for a much longer time.
In 2023, his research group, along with UMD collaborators Professor Ichiro Takeuchi and Associate Professor Yifei Mo and other partners, received $2 million under the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Future of Semiconductors (FuSe) program to discover new phase-change materials for semiconductors that are high-performance, energy-efficient, and sustainable. The CHIPS and Science Act, Ríos Ocampo says, can accelerate such research and help boost “manufacturing muscles” in the U.S.
Semiconductor fabrication is a complex, cost-intensive task involving high-precision processes. Clark Distinguished Chair Jay Lee, director of the Center for Industrial Artificial Intelligence at the Clark School, is exploring how to make semiconductor manufacturing efficient with AI. His group is building a virtual ‘digital twin’ for semiconductor manufacturing and packaging that has knowledge about the physics of the materials used, the manufacturing processes, and ways to test the reliability and performance of semiconductors—all by using real-time data from a fab.
“Data can show things that are usually invisible in the manufacturing process,” Lee explains. He adds that the digital twin, which can analyze data to improve the manufacturing process in real-time, can help companies improve performance with speed, and; industrial AI can boost the scale of semiconductor manufacturing. “The U.S. needs to reinvent what we have,” Lee says, commenting that Southeast Asian fabs already use such data-centric systems to operate.
The packaging process, which puts semiconductor chips into protective and functional packages so that chips work as intended, is vital to chip manufacturing. The Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) works with industry partners to assess the reliability of semiconductors and the packaging involved. “We call ourselves the center that relies on reliability science,” says mechanical engineering Professor Abhijit Dasgupta, whose research includes designing semiconductors for reliability. “We start by understanding how materials used in complex products behave, how to design all of them to work together in the product, how to manufacture them, and what that combination of design and manufacturing does to reliability.”
Patrick McCluskey, a professor of mechanical engineering whose research focuses on systems exposed to harsh environments such as wind turbines and space-based electronics, comments that “Maryland is the leading university in examining the reliability of electronics and electronic packaging, creating models of how they fail, and designing systems for long lifetimes in harsh environments.”
With AI, researchers at CALCE are trying to design rapid reliability tests that shorten the design cycle and help bring chips to market faster. By collecting real-time data through sensors from chips already in use, they are designing prognostic health management tools so that chips can self-diagnose and self-correct.
“It is like putting the doctor on the shoulder of the patient,” says Dasgupta.
“Maryland has great facilities and a lot of history working in reliability, security, and sustainability—areas we’ve been building as capabilities for MMEC,” says Matthew Casto, MMEC chief technology officer. “Partnering with Maryland was synergistic in bringing on those other key areas to meet our member needs and expand our technology coverage.”
With its proximity to Washington, D.C., UMD is the closest public university of its scale to the nation’s capital. The College Park campus is surrounded by a long list of federal labs and agencies: the National Institute of Standards and Technology (which is dispersing some of the funding under the CHIPS and Science Act), the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, NASA, and many others who each are customers of specialized electronics.
“The University of Maryland is in the National Capital Region, and that allows us to bridge some of the opportunities on the technical aspect of our collaboration,” says Jackie Janning-Lask, CEO of MMEC, talking about how Maryland’s location is key to the consortium’s partnership. “In a lot of our working groups, advisory groups, and steering groups, we need different perspectives from different parts of the country, from different academia and organizations. Maryland brings that to the table.” Louise Sengupta, director at Northrop Grumman’s Microelectronics Center, says UMD’s location and quality have made it an attractive academic partner to the company for more than a decade: “The University of Maryland has a fantastic Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering—one of the top 20 in the country—with most of the faculty and many of the students involved in high-quality projects around electronics,” says Sengupta.
Maryland’s facilities and microelectronics infrastructure played a significant role in Yi-Siou Huang’s decision to choose UMD for his doctorate in materials science and engineering, he says: “We have a great clean room for semiconductor fabrication here, great staff working there, and we have courses that enable students to gain experience working in the fab. That's something that stands out compared to other schools.” Huang credits his training and learning at Maryland for his recent internship opportunity, and says he’s looking forward to making a career in the semiconductor industry.
As the U.S. prepares to build the multi-billion-dollar, state-of-the-art fabs funded by the CHIPS and Science Act, it needs a skilled workforce from a diverse background to ensure the facilities thrive.
“We need people who can work in fabs and packaging facilities. We need innovators who can work in academic and small business settings. We need designers who can work in design houses—and we need them now,” Srivastava says. “Without that, we will not be able to exploit the investment that we want to make and have the right outcome.”
Industry partnerships provide Maryland’s graduates with opportunities to work at cutting-edge fab facilities, like those at Northrop Grumman, giving them first-hand industry experience: “We have ongoing internships for students to come from the University of Maryland and work in our foundries, testing areas, and packaging,” says Sengupta. “And those students, when we hire them, become stars within our company.”
In addition to offering a wide variety of graduate and Ph.D. programs in microelectronics and materials science, the Clark School, in partnership with industry, has created new undergraduate courses in electronic packaging, industrial AI, and reliability. The industrial AI center, led by Lee, offers a one-of-its-kind master’s program that aims to train 10,000 engineers over the next 10 years.
Clark School faculty work with students from community colleges in UMD research labs. One program led by electrical and computer engineering Professor Pamela Abshire supports cohorts of 12 students from community colleges to complete summer internships with companies: “This program is targeting students who might otherwise leave the semiconductor field, so we can create workforce pathways and provide career-relevant experiences,” says Abshire, who works with biomedical startups to create miniature devices.
Faculty also engage with Maryland high schools and offer workshops and short-term courses designed for industry professionals. “Maryland Engineering is involved in the full gamut of workforce development for the microelectronics area, focusing on our strengths in packaging and reliability of semiconductors and the basics of manufacturing,” says McCluskey. “Only a handful of colleges in the U.S. offer such courses.”
Funding from the CHIPS and Science Act could be a stepping-stone to reclaiming the semiconductor supply chain by investing in cutting-edge research, facilities, and training a new skilled workforce. The investment also helps bring home thousands of jobs and economic opportunities, including in rural parts of the country where fabs are being set up. As the U.S. takes a decisive turn in its technological investment, Maryland Engineering’s expertise and experience can help build a lasting legacy in semiconductor manufacturing.
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