The CHIPS Act and the Semiconductor Workforce: What to Know

What Is the CHIPS and Science Act?

The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law in August 2022 after years of growing concern about the United States’ reliance on foreign-made semiconductors. At its core, the legislation invests in rebuilding domestic capacity across the full semiconductor supply chain, from research and materials to manufacturing and workforce development.

The $11 billion directed to the CHIPS Research and Development Office funds four main programs. The National Semiconductor Technology Center is working to advance semiconductor technology and strengthen the domestic ecosystem. The National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program targets one of the biggest gaps in U.S. production: the advanced packaging sector, where most work has long been done overseas. A CHIPS Manufacturing USA Institute is focused on digital twins and semiconductor manufacturing innovation, and a Metrology Program is developing the measurement tools and standards the industry needs to grow.

The remaining $39 billion in incentives is designed to pull private investment into domestic fabrication facilities and the supply chains that support them. New fabs are expensive. A major facility can cost $20 billion or more to build, and the incentive funding is intended to make the US a more competitive place to build one.

Workforce development is written into the law as well. The underlying logic is that funding facilities without funding the people to staff them would leave the investment incomplete.

The Range of Disciplines the Industry Needs

When most people picture a semiconductor career, they picture an electrical engineer. The reality is much broader.

“Even in chip design, which is where you’d think electrical and computer engineering (ECE) would be most dominant, that only accounts for about half of the hiring,” says Dr. Janes. “And if you get outside of chip design, if you get into manufacturing, materials, equipment, advanced packaging, ECE probably accounts for less than 20 percent of the hiring. So I think the big challenge, and what we’re working on, is how to get students from other disciplines across engineering, science, technology, even the college of business with supply chain education. How do we attract these people into this area and give them the background knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the industry?”

The equipment demands alone illustrate why such a wide range of expertise is needed. Mainline lithography systems used in chip fabrication can cost hundreds of millions of dollars per tool. When a tool goes down, the entire fab slows down or stops, and the cost of lost time can be high.

Building the Pipeline

The workforce gap is not simply a matter of producing more graduates. Matching students to the right parts of the industry, and building the curriculum to support that, is still a work in progress.

“At least at the undergraduate level, there really aren’t industry-standard credentials in these areas right now,” says Dr. Janes. 

“For two-year degrees, it really does come down to regionally looking at who the major employers are in your region, what their needs are, and trying to customize something for them. At the bachelor’s, master’s, PhD level, it’s national hiring. Our graduates go all over the country, all over the world. But when you talk about technicians, you need to train those people locally. You can’t have a nationwide recruiting pool. You really need to say, look, there’s a facility coming in this region, and you tend to hire locally there.”

Advice for Students

The range of entry points into the semiconductor industry is wider than most students realize, and Dr. Janes says the path in does not require inventing a new field of study.

“There’s lots of different aspects to the industry,” says Dr. Janes. “We have companies coming saying they want to hire good programmers. We have companies saying they want materials people, or mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, industrial engineers for production. AI is making a huge impact on this industry, and data is becoming increasingly important, so people with good backgrounds in statistics and data analytics will be in high demand.”

He continues, “The co-chair of our leadership board draws a pyramid, and he says the base is your discipline: you get a degree in mechanical engineering, or whatever. Then on top of that, you build some specialized skills relevant to the industry. And the very tip of the pyramid is some special projects, maybe an internship experience in the industry, or a team project in your degree program. You don’t have to invent a new degree or a new discipline. Industry knows how to work with people from our traditional disciplines, and they’ve identified where they need that expertise. The industry is really matching things up for you.”

For decades, the semiconductor industry kept pace with demand by making chips smaller and faster. That approach has limits, and the industry is now moving in a different direction. What comes next will require a workforce that goes well beyond the traditional chip designer.

“The traditional way of making chips smaller and faster and lower power is kind of running out of steam,” says Dr. Janes. “The traditional Moore’s Law scaling is kind of plateauing. But what’s happening now is that, with advanced packaging, companies are figuring out how to put more and more chips into a single package. The analogy is housing. People first built single-story or two-story homes, and then as cities became denser, you started going with high-rise apartment buildings. The same thing is happening now in semiconductors. You’re starting to stack chips, or at least put multiple chips in a given package. Instead of just saying I’ve got to build a bigger and more complex chip, you’re saying, now I can take chips I already have and start to integrate them together to make new systems.”

“There’s more computational power in the average smartwatch than what NASA went to the moon on,” he adds. “We went to the moon on slide rules, basically. Even if you’re not a chip designer, especially if you’re not a chip designer, this is a career that’s going to keep moving. There’ll be lots of new opportunities and challenges to keep that pathway moving forward.”

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