A push to rejuvenate the U.S. semiconductor industry won’t succeed without including more women and minorities in the workforce. That’s the rationale for a new academic consortium aimed at increasing diversity in microelectronics being launched by the women presidents and engineering deans at six prominent universities.
“This is personal for us,” say the founders of the Education group for Diversification and Growth in Engineering (EDGE) Consortium, which is holding a summit next week in Washington, D.C., to lay out a national strategy. “We have often been the ‘first’ women to occupy leadership roles, and frequently are still one of the few or only women in gatherings of industry leaders.”
Last year, the federal government committed more than $50 billion to help rebuild domestic capacity in semiconductor manufacturing as part of the CHIPS and Science Act. But companies will also need a highly skilled workforce to operate those multibillion-dollar fabrication facilities as well as an army of scientists and engineers to develop the next generation of semiconductor chips. U.S. officials have estimated that filling such positions will require doubling or tripling the number of college graduates with degrees in physics, materials science, computer science, or electrical engineering.
The EDGE Consortium seeks to ensure that academic programs to expand the current workforce, which is overwhelmingly male, white, and Asian, don’t ignore groups underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math fields. Removing barriers to entry, retention, and advancement is the only way to achieve such rapid growth, they argue.
It’s also a better way to educate all students. “If we make things better for women to study, say, semiconductor physics, it will also be better for men to study semiconductor physics,” says Joanna Millunchick, dean of engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, whose president, Pam Whitten, is co-chair of the consortium along with Sian Beilock, president of Dartmouth College. “By focusing on [eliminating] the things that keep out women and minoritized populations, we have the opportunity to let in way more people.”
In an April letter announcing its formation, the consortium flagged several roadblocks, beginning with poor precollege preparation in math that weeds out potential majors. Inadequate financial and academic support, poor mentoring, and a dearth of industry internships are problems for many undergraduates, along with a curriculum that is misaligned with the skills companies are seeking. And once those students graduate and take a job in industry, a glass ceiling may impede their progress.
Some of these obstacles are not unique to microelectronics, or even to women and minoritized populations. But consortium members say the semiconductor industry also suffers from a lower profile compared with related fields such as software engineering, where coders garner media attention for developing a splashy video game or killer app. “I’m willing to bet that the average high school kid doesn’t even understand what semiconductors are or what they’re used for,” Millunchick says.
Addressing those problems will require a comprehensive, sustained effort, says Alexis Abramson, Dartmouth’s dean of engineering. “There’s no silver bullet. EDGE’s goal is to improve the entire student experience.”
The consortium is not yet at the point of applying for federal grants. But some members are already looking for government support for similar efforts. Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is spearheading a proposed national network on microelectronics education called the American Semiconductor Academy (ASA) initiative costing an estimated $500 million over 5 years.
“EDGE is reinforcing the objectives of ASA,” says King Liu, who has teamed up with the SEMI Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the industry’s trade association, to promote the academy. The CHIPS Act is expected to create 42,000 new jobs requiring advanced scientific training, according to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, who is expected to address the EDGE summit, and King Liu says a national initiative such as ASA is needed to satisfy that demand.
Congress has already made a downpayment on meeting that challenge. The CHIPS Act gave the National Science Foundation (NSF) $200 million over 5 years to support microelectronics training, and earlier this year Congress added $125 million to its current budget to continue that work. NSF has yet to allocate the money and is holding a workshop next month to get community input.
One reason for the delay is a desire to coordinate its efforts with the Department of Commerce, which is spending $500 million on a network of regional innovation hubs, and the Department of Defense, which received $2 billion in CHIPS for a network of university-based labs to prototype new chipmaking technologies. NSF is also in the final stages of selecting its first cohort of 10 large centers, called regional innovation engines, with microelectronics a likely major focus for several of the winners. The EDGE Consortium wants to make sure diversity remains a priority in such efforts, just as EDGE itself prioritized picking women leaders in STEM for the consortium’s initial lineup.
“We wanted people with a real commitment to increasing diversity,” Abramson says. “And reaching out to institutions where both the president and the dean are women kind of made sense.”
