DOD Aims To Close Gap Bringing U.S. Tech Innovation To Market by C. Todd Lopez, DOD News
May 7, 2022
The United States today is responsible for
only about 12% of microelectronics production globally, with most
production now in Asia. The U.S. also lacks much of the capacity to
confirm the viability and marketability of new microelectronics
technologies so that American industry might be convinced to invest
in them.
A circuit board contains multiple examples of important
microelectronics innovation. The Defense Department's
microelectronics commons aims to close gaps in America's
ability to bring new microelectronics technology to market.
(U.S. Department of Defense photo)
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The Defense
Department-led "microelectronics commons" aims to close the gaps
that exist now which prevent the best ideas in technology from
reaching the market. It will involve the identification of existing
production facilities that are willing to participate and use DOD
and federal funds to finance the initial investments.
Victoria Coleman, who serves now as the chief scientist of the Air
Force, originated the concept of the microelectronics commons around
seven years ago while working at the University of California at
Berkeley.
"The genesis of this idea was in a conference room
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab," she said. "The context was
an understanding from really top-tier academics that investments
that we were marking in early-stage microelectronics research could
not be proven in the facilities that we have here at home. We had to
go instead off to overseas places, in particular [Asia], to do the
work that is necessary to prove out the innovation. That kind of
blew my mind."
As an example, she said, one researcher in
neuromorphic computing at Stanford had the ability locally to
manufacture only a handful of the microelectronics he'd devised.
Neuromorphic computing emulates how the human brain interacts with
the world to deliver capabilities closer to human cognition and
power future autonomous artificial intelligence solutions that
require energy efficiency and continuous learning.
"But in
order to prove it out, you need hundreds of thousands — if not
millions — of these things," she said. "You need them at scale ...
[The researcher] had to go to [Asia] to go make them, which, if
we're worried about vendors infiltrating us, they didn't need to do
it. I mean because we went right to them. And these are the crown
jewels of what we are investing in as a nation for the next
generation. So, why did you go there? Because there was no other
place to go."
The idea for the microelectronics commons was
further developed while Coleman was at the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. She said it was there, that she worked with
staffers on Capitol Hill to get the idea put into the Creating
Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act, commonly called
"CHIPS."
A circuit board contains multiple examples of important
microelectronics innovation. The Defense Department's
microelectronics commons aims to close gaps in America's
ability to bring new microelectronics technology to market.
(U.S. Department of Defense photo)
|
Coleman said U.S.
researchers in both academia and industry still develop fantastic
concepts for new microelectronics technologies, including for things
such as novel photonics, spintronic materials, quantum computing, or
non-volatile memory, among others.
In a research lab at a
university, for instance, technological advancements in
microelectronics that exist now or that may be invented in the
future, might only exist on paper or in a handful of real-world
prototypes. Ultimately, the goal for the innovator of a new
technology is to have a market interested in making use of it and a
producer interested in manufacturing it.
Proving that a new
microelectronics technology works and is marketable requires
innovators to first find somebody willing to take on the initial
risk of investing in their ideas. It may require the production of
as many as a million quality protypes to prove the technology works
and that businesses would be interested in integrating it into the
products they produce.
That intermediary step between a researcher's concept and a
manufacturer's commitment — called "lab-to-fab" — is largely
happening now in overseas semiconductor fabrication plants, the
FABs, rather than the U.S., Coleman said.
"In
microelectronics [there is a] 'canyon of death.' You may have a
theory about a new kind of device that will give you lots of
computational advantages, but nobody will invest the money to go and
build a FAB — take $20 billion to build something — unless you can
show in practice, not just theory, that it will give you the
advantages, the compute advantages that you are expecting," she
said. "The microelectronics commons sits in the middle. The commons
straddles these two extremes, where at one end you can build three
devices and at the other end you need to build literally billions of
them at very high cost."
With the microelectronics commons,
Coleman says DOD proposes to, at least initially, fill in the
intermediary step that allows the best new technologies being
developed in U.S. labs to make the significant jump to
commercialization.
Development of the microelectronics commons will first involve
facilities that already exist stepping forward to act as "hub
nodes." These facilities would be able to produce 200 mm wafers for
microelectronic production and might be developed from existing
facilities already in the U.S. Where such facilities exist, they
could be augmented by funding from DOD to make them compatible with
the microelectronics commons. Coleman said the government wouldn't
pay to build new facilities, but would pay to augment staff or
invest in new equipment.
In addition to the hubs, there
would also be "core nodes" capable of producing larger 300 mm wafers
more suitable to make the transition to commercial production.
About 10 hub nodes and two core nodes are expected to be needed
to make up the microelectronics commons.
"Our [notion] was
that you will have one place where you do 300 mm, and then you can
have multiple places where you do 200 mm," Coleman said. "Each one
of these places was specialized in a lot of these technologies.
Maybe one will be photonics, maybe the other will be memory, maybe
another will be logic. And then when, you know, when they are mature
enough at the hubs, they move into the core. Then you go from the
200 mm to 300 mm."
With the microelectronics commons
operating, novel technology developed domestically could make it
from lab to market entirely inside the United States. The commons
would both ensure that American ingenuity stays inside the U.S. and
isn't stolen by adversaries and that the nation rebuilds the
capacity to do on its own what it must now depend on foreign nations
to do.
While DOD plans initially to pay for development of
the commons, it's not expected to have to pay for forever, Coleman
said.
"The notion is that eventually the commons becomes
self-sustaining," she said. "You know, after the initial set of
investments, maybe the government maintains a 10% investment. But
it's managed as a business with different kinds of profit margins
depending on who the customer is. It's a national facility that is
used by multiple actors — both professors, small businesses, and
startups and large businesses — with differential kind of access
rates."
Getting
microelectronics design and production back in the U.S. is critical,
Coleman said, because anything less means the U.S. might end up
entirely dependent on an adversary to produce the electronics the
U.S. needs for defense.
"What it means is that, first of
all, we will not be relying on our on our peer adversaries to prove
out our innovations," she said. "Because today they have us in a
chokehold. So we can invest a little money on what we think might
pay off. But in order for us to prove out our innovations, we depend
on them, and that is an unacceptable situation to be in."
A
common misconception is that so long as the U.S. remains the
innovator — the designers and developers of technology — it makes no
difference where the technology is finally built. But Coleman said
that's wrong.
"If you let go of production, that means that
you are de-skilling the workforce, and it eventually brings you to
the place where you can't do design either," she said. "It's a
really kind of insidious cycle that needs to be broken, and CHIPS
kind of recognized that. So, all these things — design, production,
assembly, packaging and testing — they all need to be, we all need
to have them here at home."
She said another option is
what's being referred to "friend-shoring," where if those
capabilities are not inside the U.S., they reside with allied and
partner nations.
"The key message should be that we are
captive for proving out our innovations to China and our
adversaries, and that is a national emergency," she said. "There's
no other way to talk about it. It's just unacceptable that we found
ourselves in that situation. ... The solution to that is this
commons. This is what the commons is all about."
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