US Need to Secure its Semiconductor Industry

By IndraStra Global News Team

According to a report authored by Will Hunt, a Research Analyst at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), the US should hire more foreign talent and abolish some visa hurdles to secure its semiconductor industry and its supply chain.

At an event called Bringing the Chipmakers Home: Attracting Manufacturers and the Talent They Need, CSET's Will Hunt said "re-shoring" chip-making capacity to America should be paired with other policies, like workforce development, high-skilled immigration reform, and speeding up the process for building chip fabs.

According to Hunt's analysis, manufacturing incentives under the CHIPS Act are predicted to boost job growth in the silicon industry by 13 percent over the next decade, with the majority of the growth occurring in high-skilled engineering positions. While 27,000 new employment can be filled by recruiting from other businesses and training students from universities and community colleges. 

A shortage of approximately 3,500 people might be filled by importing workers from other countries, especially current employees of leading chipmakers like TSMC and Samsung, just migrating from overseas fabs to freshly established fabs in the US.

Hunt reminded the audience that initiatives such as removing country-based caps on green cards could help to improve immigration paths to facilitate immigration. In his white paper, he also urged that foreign chipmakers be subject to wage limitations, to encourage them to hire only the most critical staff.

Hunt noted that non-citizens make up the majority of graduate students in the United States studying semiconductor-related areas. And the good news for the US is that foreign-born talent prefers to stay in the US.

Beyond building alternative tech talent pipelines, Hunt stated that the United States must grasp the incentives offered by Taiwan and Korea for American companies to develop even better lures. Instead of competing, the US should engage with partners to strategically diversify and share chip supply chain operations. For example, there is no onshore capacity for cutting-edge logic and DRAM chips, despite the high demand.

Additionally, Hunt asserts that it takes 4.5 years to develop a fab in the United States because of regulatory constraints. As a result, foundries may struggle to produce the latest generation of chips — a factor to consider when partnering with foreign countries.

Hunt also asked if the US could expand its entity list, known as the Foreign-Produced Direct Product (FDPR), to handle those semiconductor markets that it presently cannot address and theoretically prevent non-allied countries from getting an advantage. He opted against it because he thought that was not a good strategy. After all, it could direct (or influence) chip manufacturers to ignore US technologies in favor of developing alternatives.

IndraStra Global is now available on
Apple News, Google News, Flipboard, Feedburner, and Telegram

COPYRIGHT: This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

REPUBLISH: Republish our articles online or in print for free if you follow these guidelines. https://www.indrastra.com/p/republish-us.html