Dive Brief:
- The Biden administration awarded $269 million last week to 33 projects in a bid to boost microelectronics manufacturing capacity and workforce development.
- The funds, which come from the CHIPS and Science Act and executed by the Defense Department, include $230 million for six technical areas — quantum, secure edge computing, 5G/6G, electromagnetic warfare, commercial leap-ahead, artificial intelligence — as well as $39 million for a cross-hub enablement solution.
- The projects will support the domestic prototyping and fabrication of microelectronics and build a sustainable pipeline of domestically produced microelectronics for the U.S. military, according to the DOD’s announcement.
Dive Insight:
The projects are from eight regional innovation hubs established in September 2023, dubbed the Microelectronics Commons.
The hubs are located in Massachusetts, Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, New York and California, set to receive $2 billion over the next five years to work on specific areas of interest to the Defense Department and its industrial base.
“These CHIPS and Science Act investments through the Microelectronics Commons will advance innovation for components that enable the most sophisticated defense systems, strengthening our national security,” Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a statement.
Since the launch of the Microelectronics Commons, the eight hubs have grown their memberships from around 400 to over 1,200, according to the release. Members include prototyping and manufacturing facilities, academics, defense industrial base partners and government program managers.
Over the past year, the hubs have focused on sharing resources, modernizing research facilities, and expanding microelectronics workforce development initiatives, including recruiting, reskilling and upskilling workers. They also expanded microelectronics education by targeting smaller and rural schools, community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions.
The recent awards are one of the DOD’s ongoing investments in scaling the microelectronics sector for national security needs. Intel was awarded up to $3 billion in CHIPS funding last week to manufacture leading-edge semiconductors for the agency.
Earlier this month, the department awarded Honeywell $25.8 million for its Plymouth, Minnesota, plant to produce or acquire trusted strategic radiation-hardened microelectronics.
The DOD also awarded $9.5 million to Indiana-based nonprofit Regional Opportunity Initiatives to address the need for increased microelectronics production and to upskill the workforce.
