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Oct 05, 2023

Your View: CHIPS act and semiconductor manufacturing are essential.

In July 2022, the United States government enacted the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America and Science Act and appropriated $39 billion for the CHIPS for America Fund.

In July 2022, the United States government enacted the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America and Science Act and appropriated $39 billion for the CHIPS for America Fund.

The fund provides financial incentives for building, expanding and equipping domestic semiconductor manufacturing facilities as well as supporting the supply chain for manufacturing equipment, materials and services. The fund also provides $11 billion for joint government and commercial R&D in semiconductor technology.

This technology is vitally important because semiconductor devices and the microelectronics they enable are uniquely important to nearly all modern industrial and national security activities. Communications, advanced weapons, modern manufactured products and key emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and quantum computing, all depend on microelectronics. Therefore, our national economic health, military readiness and a large part of future technological progress depend of the availability and application of semiconductors.

In spite of the vital importance of semiconductors, the U.S. share of global semiconductor fabrication capacity fell from about 36% in 1990 to about 10% in 2020. By 2020, the U.S. share of the most advanced semiconductor devices had fallen to essentially zero, making the United States totally dependent on the international semiconductor market for these critical components.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. produces approximately 60% of the world’s semiconductor devices. But about 93% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor devices are made by TSMC. The remainder of the world’s most advanced semiconductor devices are made in South Korea. Either political or military initiatives in East Asia could make the supply of these devices vulnerable.

The history of the transistor began in 1947 with its invention at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The inventors, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, shared a patent for their invention in 1950 and the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. The world’s first commercial transistor manufacture began at the Western Electric factory on Union Boulevard in Allentown in 1951.

Roughly 10 years after that pioneering work, Martin Atalla and Dawon Kahng, also at Bell Labs, invented the metal oxide semiconductor transistor. The simplicity, versatility and ease of fabrication of the MOS transistor made it the superior choice for high-level manufacture. Virtually all of today’s modern semiconductor manufacture uses MOS transistors.

In 1958 Jack Kilby, a Texas Instruments engineer, invented a complete electronic circuit consisting of transistors and other electrical components on a single piece of germanium. Interconnection of the components was provided externally. For his integrated circuit, Kilby received the Nobel Prize in physics for 2000. Roughly six months after Kilby’s announcement, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor proposed a more practical configuration. Noyce proposed using silicon rather than germanium and incorporated internal copper lines for electrical connections. Later versions replaced the copper lines with photo defined aluminum. Modern integrated circuits are based on Noyce’s concept.

In the years following, commercial development of semiconductors featured bold entrepreneurs and individual initiative. But there was more. In the early years, a sort of stealth U.S. government industrial policy stimulated the growth and direction of the domestic industry.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s purchases in the domestic semiconductor market in the 1950s and ’60s provided steady demand and profits to U.S. manufacturers that helped underwrite the related R&D. Government also supported AT&T’s de facto telephone monopoly. And AT&T’s monopoly profits financed Bell Labs’ R&D labs to provide a steady stream of experienced engineers carrying readily licensed technology to industry. Today’s CHIPS for America Fund is a modern analog of that early government support.

Most voters and elected officials understand microelectronics poorly, if at all. Even fewer understand the science, technology and economics of semiconductor manufacture. Our collective ignorance doesn’t change the fact that the most modern microelectronics is and will be vital to our economy and national security. That implies the need for domestic microelectronics R&D, technology and manufacture.

So, our national self-interest is served by the success of the CHIPS for America Fund. As voters and informed citizens we need to insist that our elected representatives keep abreast of the actions and results that come from this initiative. We can’t allow ourselves and them to be distracted by the most recently discovered political drama.

Glen T. Cheney of Bethlehem is a retired manager of microelectronic research and development with Bell Laboratories in Allentown and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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