Breakfast Bytes Blogs

The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) recently put out the Interim Report for the Decadal Plan for Semiconductors. The full report is planned for later in the year.

To set some context, here is the opening paragraph of the executive summary:

The U.S. semiconductor industry leads the world in innovation, based in large part on aggressive research and development (R&D) spending. The industry invests nearly one-fifth of its annual revenue in R&D each year, second only to the pharmaceuticals sector. In addition, Federal funding of semiconductor R&D serves as the catalyst for private R&D spending. Together, private and federal semiconductor R&D investments have sustained the pace of innovation in the U.S., enabling it to become the global leader in the semiconductor industry. Those R&D investments have nurtured the development of innovative and commercially viable products, and as a direct result, have led to a significant contribution to the U.S. economy and jobs.

The report constantly refers to ICT which doesn't stand for integrated circuit technology, as you might expect, but for information and communication technologies. The decadal plan outlines research priorities in ICT, similar to the international technology roadmap for semiconductors (ITRS), which itself grew out of an earlier report like this one (going back to 1984, almost 40 years ago):

The Decadal Plan for Semiconductors complements this report and identifies specific goals with quantitative targets. It is expected that the Decadal Plan will have a major impact on the semiconductor industry, similar to the impact of the 1984 10-year SRC Research Goals document that was continued in 1994 as the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, and which later became the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in 1999.

The heart of the document identifies five "seismic shifts" in ICT:

1. Fundamental breakthroughs in analog hardware are required to generate smarter world-machine interfaces that can sense, perceive, and reason
2. The growth of memory demands will outstrip global silicon supply presenting opportunities for radically new memory and storage solutions
3. Always-available communication requires new research directions that address the imbalance of communication capacity versus data generation rates
4. Breakthroughs in hardware research are needed to address emerging security challenges in highly interconnected systems and artificial intelligence (AI)
5. Ever-rising energy demands for computing versus global energy production is creating new risk, and new computing paradigms offer opportunities with dramatically improved energy efficiency

One thing that is notable by its absence, given the history of ITRS in the past, is any real discussion of process technology and manufacturing expertise. One of the most advanced fabs in the US is not owned by a domestic headquartered company. In a business-as-usual free-trade world, international foundries will sell you all the wafers you need. But this might present some supply chain risk to address. Another challenge is the extent to which the five "seismic shifts" can be addressed without very close relations between research and manufacturing. For example, the first two shifts are "new analog" semiconductors, and "new memory and storage" solutions.

Of course, this being essentially an industry perspective, the "call to action" is a call for money:

Maintaining and strengthening the leadership of the United States in ICT during this new semiconductor era requires a sustained additional $3.4B federal investment per year throughout this decade (i.e., tripling Federal funding for semiconductor research) to conduct large-scale industry-relevant, fundamental semiconductor research. (The Decadal Plan Executive Committee offered recommendations on allocation of the additional $3.4B investment per year among the five seismic shifts identified in the Decadal Plan. The basis of allocation is the market share trend and our analysis of the R&D requirements for different semiconductor and ICT technologies).

In one sense, this is a lot of money, but in another, it seems out of balance with the cost of a single fab (let's say $15B) or the investments that other countries are making or have planned. It seems optimistic to have a ten-year-plan to "identify fundamental goals and targets to alter the current trajectory of semiconductor technology" when so little of it is onshore.

The rest of the report goes through the five seismic shifts in a lot more detail. I'll leave you to read that if you want to dig deeper.

Here's a graph to wrap up (seismic shift #2). We're starting to run out of silicon wafers, at least on an annual basis, just looking at silicon-based memories:

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