University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering hopes grant will help foster domestic chip manufacturing
The University of Chicago announced Monday that it has received a $3 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to help facilitate the growth of American semiconductor and chip design and manufacturing.
The NSF Advanced Chip Enablement (ACE-3D) Chip Design Hub will be based at the University of Chicago as part of the NSF Chip Design Hub Program — which awards grants for education, training, and infrastructure for semiconductor and chip design.
Farah Fahim, a senior scientist at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the microelectronics division director at Fermilab, explained in a news release that the U.S. has a robust domestic chip design innovation program, but falls behind in manufacturing.
"By giving academia access to advanced manufacturing resources, we can propel manufacturing efforts across the country," Fahim said in the release.
The ACE-3D hub will focus on the design of vertically stacked chips as an advancement over the flat squares used in today's laptops and cellphones, as well as creating and deploying other advanced 3D chip technologies, the UChicago release said. In doing so, the hub will develop tools to bring together the major stakeholders in the chip design process: academia, national laboratories, and manufacturing.
UChicago said U.S. chip manufacturing tools have been a sticking point in American advancement, calling them "disparate and hard to address."
To that end, the ACE-3D Chip Design Hub will create design flows and assembly design kits to show how the complicated manufacturing work is done, the release said. These design materials will be shared by with other academic institutions across the country with the goal of developing and training a skilled workforce in the domestic chip and semiconductor industry, UChicago said.
The design hub also seeks to bring together undergraduates, Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors who design chips with the American manufacturers that will assemble them, UChicago said.
The overall goal is to foster economic competitiveness in 3D chip design in the U.S.
"With our unmatched collaborations between academia, industry and national labs, UChicago is the natural place to grow both lab innovations and workforce solutions for the chip industry," U of C Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Dean Nadya Mason said. "We are proud to be home to this new NSF center dedicated to spurring domestic semiconductor production."
Other microchip innovation hubs and industry partners expressed excitement about the new chip design hub at UChicago.
"Manufacturing will thrive because chip design training will be more accessible and research will thrive because there will be a community supporting this important effort," Fahim said in the release.