The CHIPS for America Act was signed into law in response to the impact of the US’s reduced semiconductor manufacturing capability on the infrastructure, economy, and national defense. The $50 billion in federal investments has incentivized an additional $200 billion from industry. However, there will be an estimated semiconductor workforce shortage of computer and electrical engineers and computer scientists of 67,000 by 2030. At the same time, the semiconductor industry is transitioning away from process size shrink as the primary driver of product innovation due to the increasing cost and complexity of design and fabrication of monolithic IC SoCs at advanced nodes.
Matthew Morrison,
University of Notre Dame
Thus, the key question is, who will design these high-demand chips? How can we effectively build a workforce to architect and design the ICs of the future? Funding and curriculum sharing alone for a given field also does not necessarily lead to hiring and enrollment increases in universities; excitement and interest are also required.
Making hardware education accessible is essential to meeting the long-term economic demands from the entire computing industry. In this talk, the current state of hardware and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) education in the United States will be discussed. Current initiatives and successes in training students and engineers in the field of analog and digital chip design, offering an end-to-end plan that enables them to design, lay out, and verify chips, send them for fabrication, and test and characterize the fabricated chips. These initiatives include the Center for Education of Microelectronics Designers, the ChipsHub, the Apple New Silicon Initiative, and Google Custom Silicon. Finally, emerging opportunities in semiconductor education, including the Semi Foundation Veterans Initiative and Computing in Spaceflight will be presented.
Matthew Morrison is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received a B.S. degree in computer engineering (2010), an M.S. degree in computer engineering (Thesis, 2012), and a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering (Dissertation, 2014), all from the University of South Florida. Prior to his academic career, he served as a nuclear electronics technician in the United States Navy from 1999-2005. He currently serves on the Organizing Committee for the Design Automation Conference Summer School, the Governing Council for the American Semiconductor Academy and the Center for Education of Microelectronics Designers, and has held visiting faculty positions with Howard University and Google.