Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 1, 2022.
Andrew Harnik | Reuters
WASHINGTON — The U.S. will use funds from the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act to create a minimum of two large-scale logic fabs for the manufacture of semiconductors, together with multiple high-volume advanced packaging facilities, by 2030, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced Thursday.
Raimondo’s announcement comes because the department prepares to open applications next week for businesses to receive funding under the CHIPS Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in August.
“Each cluster will include a sturdy supplier ecosystem, R&D facilities to constantly innovate recent process technologies, and specialized infrastructure,” Raimondo told students at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “Each of those clusters will employ 1000’s of employees in well-paying jobs.”
U.S.-based manufacturing plants, generally known as “fabs,” will produce advanced memory chips “on economically competitive terms,” Raimondo said. The fabs may even help meet the necessity for current generation and mature-node chips “most crucial to economic and national security,” she added.
“These are the chips that go into cars, medical devices, and lots of of our defense capabilities,” she added.
The CHIPS Act was established to extend U.S. competitiveness within the semiconductor market against manufacturing monopolies like Taiwan, which produces 92% of the world’s leading-edge chips, in accordance with Raimondo. The huge reliance on a single country for production exacerbated supply-chain problems through the pandemic, and generated national security concerns because any disruption to chip production can hinder the production of a spread of products.
“That is fundamentally a national security issue,” she said. “As I said, CHIPS is about gaining a technological edge, export controls are about keeping it.”
Raimondo also highlighted concerns about China’s usage of semiconductors in its technological weapons systems. Taiwan’s proximity to China — and the prospect of Chinese aggression against Taiwan — has also raised concerns inside the Biden administration and Congress.
“Do not be naive about this, China … (wants) the technology to enhance their military capability, and export controls (are) narrowly defined or designed to ensure that they do not get these chips to enhance their military capability,” Raimondo told Georgetown students.
The Commerce secretary reiterated the federal government’s plans to take a position $11 billion in what it calls a National Semiconductor Technology Center.
“The vision for it’s an ambitious public-private partnership where government, industry, customers, suppliers, educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and investors converge to innovate, connect, and solve problems,” Raimondo said of the middle, which can actually comprise several locations across the country geared toward “solving probably the most impactful, relevant and universal R&D challenges within the industry,” she added.
“Most significantly, the NSTC goes to make sure the U.S. leads the way in which in the subsequent generation of semiconductor technologies—the whole lot from quantum computing, materials science, and AI to the longer term applications we have not even considered yet,” Raimondo said.
