in this 2021 photo, provided by Intel, employees in a cleanroom are working in "bunny suits" at the company's D1X factory in Hillsboro, Oregon. Intel is one of a consortium of organizations that will benefit from the $160 million federal grant.
Walden Kirsch / Courtesy of Intel Corporation
About 100 different industry, government and academic organizations are part of the consortium that will spend 160 million over the next 10 years to increase research on and production of semiconductors. These components are vital to virtually every electronic device you are likely to use, from mobile phones to home appliances. Industry and government leaders say it’s vital that the U.S. keep up with demand and support its semiconductor research, development and production.
That’s the intention behind the Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology, or FAST, grant. Oregon State University is coordinating the consortium’s efforts. Rob Stone is a professor of mechanical, industrial and manufacturing engineering at OSU and the interim CEO and principal investigator of FAST. He joins us to share more about how the money will be used and its effect on Oregon’s economy.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez, in this week for Dave Miller. We start today’s show with some recent good news for Oregon’s semiconductor industry. These components can be found in a vast array of electronic devices we use in daily life, from cell phones to home appliances. In 2022, Oregon exported $14 billion worth of these chips. And now, an Oregon consortium of nearly 100 industry, government and academic organizations, known as FAST (Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology), has been awarded $160 million in grant money. That money will go towards semiconductor research production and workforce training in the state.
For more on this, we’re joined now by Rob Stone. He’s a professor of mechanical, industrial and manufacturing engineering at Oregon State University, and he’s the interim CEO and principal investigator for this statewide initiative. Rob Stone, thank you for being here and welcome to Think Out Loud.
Rob Stone: Thanks, Jenn. Glad to be here.
Chávez: I just wanna start us off with a very basic question here. I just mentioned how semiconductors are in virtually every digital or electronic device we use: computers, phones, calculators, household items. For folks who aren’t steeped in this world, is there anything else we should know about how they work and what they do?
Stone: Oh, sure. Semiconductors are kind of like this nice, cool material that exists that can essentially act as both a conductor – something like how a copper wire carries electricity – and they can also then be acting like an insulator, like a glass or something that keeps electricity from flowing. So it’s like this cool property that they have where you can essentially turn that on and off. That allows them to act essentially as a computer. You put lots of those together and you can have billions of on and off switches together that essentially are doing the calculations and all of that underpinning stuff that runs our lives now, that allows us to have the phones, the computers and all that going.
Chávez: Cool. So what presence does the global semiconductor industry have in Oregon today, because it’s a pretty prominent part of Oregon, right?
Stone: It is, and it’s kind of funny because I think it’s an underappreciated asset that Oregon has. There are only three places in the world where you have a sector, an industry that can go from clean-slate design of an advanced logic chip, all the way to full-scale manufacturing in the same place. And Hillsboro, Oregon is really one of them. The other two exist out in Taiwan and South Korea. Having that capability here in Oregon in one spot is a very unique and beneficial leverage we had in this proposal.
Chávez: And what role does this industry play in Oregon’s economy at large?
Stone: This is one of the largest contributors to our state economy, our state GDP. And beyond that, I mean, it’s kind of key to the U.S.’s ability to have computational informational security, national security efforts. So it plays an outsized role for the state.
Chávez: As I mentioned, you are the interim CEO and principal investigator of FAST – that stands for Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology.
Stone: You’ve got it.
Chávez: I know Oregon State University is the lead educational institution of this big consortium, which is made up of almost 100 different partners. What are the main goals of FAST?
Stone: The main goals of FAST are really to help keep our semiconductor industry here in the state at the top of their game. It’s also really to grow and expand that further across the state. So while there’s certainly a definite presence in Hillsboro that we often refer to as the “Silicon Forest,” part of FAST’s goal is to help spring up new companies, new members of that supply chain down the Willamette Valley, through Corvallis, through Eugene area, and across the Cascades, through Bend and out into Crook County.
Our goal is that 10 years from now, there’ll be a number of new companies here that support the big ones like Intel and Analog Devices, and they’ll be scattered about in more places, and more local communities will see direct benefits from the semiconductor sector.
Chávez: Nice. I have to say, I hadn’t heard “Silicon Forest” before.
Stone: Oh, really?
Chávez: I like that a lot.
Stone: Yeah, that is good.
Chávez: So it sounds like you and your partners have been working toward this type of investment that you have received with this grant for some time. What was, personally, your first reaction to finding out that it came through, that the National Science Foundation awarded this grant to FAST?
Stone: Well, I think when I saw the email … I’ll preface it with this. I had the opportunity to work at NSF for four years, so I kind of got to know some of their internal workings. I had an email back on May 1 that gave me the inkling [that they] would only send those messages out if [they] knew an award was coming. And I had to read it several times, and then I had to have someone else read it to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.
It was just real elation and jubilation, and it was such a nice end to an effort that so many folks … you said nearly 100. We’re at 99 partners, if you will, in this endeavor. Many folks have put so many hours in over the last two years to get us here. So it was a wonderful feeling.
Chávez: Well, congratulations. And I want to take the main priorities of FAST one-by-one here. So first of all, what do you see as some of the most exciting ways that research being done at OSU and other higher ed institutions are contributing to this technology as it evolves, and how will this grant support that?
Stone: Yeah, that’s a great question. We spent the last two years working together and getting ready to turn in the proposal for this award. So in addition to Oregon State, there’s University of Oregon and Portland State that are really involved on the research front. But with our partners in industry, some of the example areas we’ve been working in is about memory performance. You think about how fast and speedy the chips themselves have gotten recently, memory has not quite kept up. We’ve got to address that gap that exists between being able to process really fast but then having to wait to go and retrieve some bit from memory.
That’s one of the areas. Another one is, as these transistors in the chips have gotten smaller and smaller, and you can pack more into the same space, what that creates is now a really power dense configuration. So there’s a lot of power going in and it heats it up. We need to find new ways in which we can cool these materials so that they can continue to perform. So there’s some power delivering and cooling topics as well, and other things around operational innovation.
All of those topics, through the discussions we had over the past couple of years, several of our companies decided that there was enough interest, enough expertise that existed across the three institutions, and enough interest on their parts that they actually went ahead and started funding some work to be done with folks at Oregon State and University of Oregon, along with companies like Tektronix, Intel, Siemens and Lam Research. So we’ve actually started some of this work even before we knew if FAST was going to be funded.
Chávez: Amazing. Meanwhile, another important aspect of this work is creating career pathways for people to join this field, and this could be within higher education, or before that, like STEM education in K-12 schools. Can you give us some examples of how the grant can help steer young people towards this field?
Stone: Yeah. Well, one of the big things that we recognized in FAST is that we have to help people know that this career pathway exists, or more folks know that it exists. So we’re starting in K-12, and in one of those, one of the ways we’re doing that is what we call semiconductor externships for K-12 educators. These are like teachers or career counselors. They’re taking the summer and spending some time with our industry partners to sort of look under the hood – go into the company, go into the fabs, learn how these things work – and then develop materials that they can then take back to the classroom to interest students, introduce semiconductor pathways to the students, and then share those more broadly. That will help us lay the groundwork for the next future generation of semiconductor workers.
At the community college level … For instance, one of our partners, Chemeketa Community College, they’re hiring what we call career navigators, and one that’s going to be specifically focused on reaching out to the surrounding area and explaining what the semiconductor careers are. They can come into community college and either take a route to be a semiconductor technician or do the base courses to follow on and become an engineer or scientist at one of the other four-year institutions.
Those are a couple of examples that are really, I think, critical to us to lay the groundwork. And then of course, in the four years, we’re doing things to really have industry come in and help us design that curriculum so that folks who come out with a degree in, say, electrical engineering or mechanical engineering, they’ve seen real-world examples from semiconductor companies. That helped them not only generate interest but generate knowledge and be able to step into those roles more quickly with less training once they graduate.
Chávez: And then just lastly, in a few moments that we have left, I know that you mentioned you want to see the potential for new companies and startups in Oregon, right? What do you want to see there, and how will this grant fit into that?
Stone: There, we’re really focused on, one, providing entrepreneurs the support they need to know how to run a company, and then getting them access to funds so that they can actually staff up and create a product that is needed. And I think that’s the key. Our approach is to start with our existing semiconductor ecosystem that we’ve got [and] find out what they need. What are they predicting that’s going to be a new type of material or a new type of component that they would typically want to buy from a supplier? Then point people toward those kinds of problems to solve, so that when this company springs up, it’s got a built-in customer waiting for it.
Chávez: Well, fantastic, and we will definitely keep our eyes on this work. Rob Stone, thank you so much for joining us and giving us some insight into the work you’re doing.
Stone: Thanks so much, Jenn. Glad to be here.
Chávez: Rob Stone is a professor of mechanical, industrial and manufacturing engineering at Oregon State University, and the interim CEO and principal investigator of the FAST initiative.
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