Don’t ‘Lose Sight’ of Future Chip Goals to Fix Short-Term Shortages: Startup
Cerfe Labs applauds the Biden administration’s increased focus on semiconductors as “a national strategic priority,” but it should resist chasing short-term solutions to the detriment of long-term goals, commented the microelectronics R&D startup in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry…
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and Security inquiry into how the U.S. can help boost the domestic semiconductor industry’s competitiveness and capacity amid global chip shortages (see 2103110054). “We expect that the vast majority of the attention and dollars in this effort will be spent on replicating state of the art semiconductor manufacturing and packaging capabilities domestically,” said Cerfe, in Friday’s posting in docket BIS-2021-0011. “This investment will be large and will have focus on near term capabilities and immediate jobs,” but will yield technologies that “will quickly begin aging,” losing their state of the art (SOTA) status in “a few short years,” it said. It also “risks a missed opportunity to lay a groundwork” for more future-proof microelectronics, it said. Countries that “invest strategically in accelerating the process from early-stage R&D proofs of concept to manufacturable technology will be poised to take over dominant positions in SOTA microelectronics well into the future,” it said. “Every week we see evidence of enhanced willingness of other countries to invest more heavily, so there is risk of losing a leadership position in future microelectronics technologies with no action or delayed action.” Though near-term semiconductor supply chain issues are important, the administration should “not lose sight of the long term leadership opportunity that can be had through fostering of a new wave of microelectronics start-up companies,” it said. Comments in the docket are due April 5.