Dive Brief:
- The Biden administration will offer $54 million for small businesses’ research and development opportunities in the microelectronics industry, the Commerce Department announced last week.
- The funding aims to encourage competition in the sector and allow small businesses to explore innovative ideas by providing them with needed resources.
- The focus on microelectronics, small electronic devices made using semiconductor-based materials and processing, is part of the administration’s push to invest $11 billion in semiconductor R&D efforts.
Dive Insight:
The funding program will focus on microelectronics projects across various research topics including measurement services, manufacturing technologies, assurance technologies — which ensure the security of a technology system’s features — and advanced metrology R&D testbeds for testing various components and traceability.
One area in which the U.S. is prioritizing funds is metrology, the science of measurement and its application, which plays a key role in semiconductor manufacturing, the Commerce Department stated in the release. The current tools for monitoring and measuring in the U.S. are limiting innovation and quality, in addition to costing more than other possibilities.
“As devices become more complex, smaller, and multi-layered, the ability to measure, monitor, predict, and ensure quality in manufacturing becomes much more difficult and uncertain,” the department said in the release.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report in September 2022 on opportunities to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The report identified seven major challenges in metrology, such as improving modeling processing and meeting stringent requirements for semiconductor materials purity.
The funded activities will address, but aren’t limited to, the seven challenges and other advanced production technologies related to microelectronics.
“Small businesses have an important role to play in the semiconductor ecosystem,” Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Laurie Locascio said in a statement. “NIST has long supported the [Small Business Innovation Research] program, and this funding opportunity dedicated to CHIPS Metrology will help give small businesses the opportunity to take innovative ideas, scale them for the commercial marketplace, and boost the U.S. economy.”
The Department of Defense is also looking to build up the country’s microelectronics sector. In October, the department awarded $238.3 million to eight U.S. locations to serve as microelectronics manufacturing hubs. Microelectronics can bridge and accelerate the lab-to-fab transition, an infamous “Valley of Death” between research and development and production, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
