Opinion: Facing chip shortage, U.S. must train semiconductor workforce

As we slide into the holiday shopping season, many consumers will soon face the effects of the global semiconductor chip shortage that has hobbled sales of cars and electronics products for nearly a year.

The shortage has forced companies to revise sales projections downward, with the cost to the auto industry alone reaching $210 billion, according to recent estimates. But underlying the inconvenience of stalled electronics deliveries are critical vulnerabilities exposed by the shortage. Systems that we rely upon for communications, commerce, defense and more are in jeopardy because the United States has lost its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing over the past three decades.

Our country urgently needs to reinvest in semiconductor design and manufacturing, including the development of a highly trained workforce. A 2017 Deloitte-SEMI survey found that 82% of semiconductor industry executives reported a shortage of qualified job candidates. Simply put, investing in hard infrastructure such as factories won’t help if we can’t get enough skilled technicians and engineers to work in them.

To say that this is a matter of national security is not hyperbole. Currently, many leading U.S.-based tech companies send their advanced chip designs to Taiwan for fabrication, leaving them vulnerable to geopolitical shifts in the region that could disrupt their supply chain. If our country is to regain our leadership in this area, we need to double the number of students trained in microelectronics graduating today from all U.S. colleges and universities.

Congress has a chance to address this. Members of the House and Senate are working to resolve differences between the Senate-passed U.S. Innovation and Competition Act and the House-passed National Science Foundation for the Future Act. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing Thursday on the topic of ensuring American leadership in microelectronics.

Developing a skilled labor force at the scale and speed necessary for the U.S. to regain leadership in semiconductor manufacturing requires universities across the nation to collaborate with each other and to partner with industry to revitalize semiconductor education and training. This proposed American Semiconductor Academy should be geographically distributed across the country with participating schools sharing curricula, facilitating access to industry-leading software tools and coordinating hands-on training for students.

The mission of the academy is to not only fill the pipeline of talent for U.S. semiconductor companies but to also facilitate the transfer of research innovations from university labs to the marketplace.

The Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that $50 billion invested by the federal government will result in 42,000 new jobs in semiconductor manufacturing over five years, leading to a total of 280,000 new jobs in the U.S. economy. Only a broad and inclusive network like the proposed academy can sustainably meet this growing workforce development need.

It takes years to educate and train students to be able to join the semiconductor industry workforce, so this investment in our nation’s future needs to happen now.

Other countries have already provided financial incentives to support domestic chip manufacturing. This summer, the Taiwan government announced an investment of $300 million to launch semiconductor graduate programs over the next decade in collaboration with leading chipmakers, including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the largest dedicated semiconductor foundry in the world.