Q&A: Can chiplets save the US semiconductor industry?

The effort to re-shore chip manufacturing in the US could be in peril as a new presidential administration has signaled a shift in direction, all while a semiconductor industry seems at times to be struggling.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has indicated the CHIPS and Science Act passed under the Biden Administration could be on the chopping block once he takes office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Just last week, the federal government said it plans to cut back by more than $500 million the funding it planned to divvy out to Intel to build new fabrication facilities as the company has undergone layoffs in the face of financial challenges.

Brandon Lucia, a Carnegie Mellon professor of electrical and computer engineering and CEO of chip startup Efficient Computer, believes the success of the CHIPS Act will hinge on three factors: substantial funding, advancements in manufacturing capabilities, and a thriving ecosystem of innovators in the U.S. 

Efficient Computer is planning to launch its first commercial chip — an energy-efficient, general-purpose processor — in the first half of 2025. As demand for more powerful chips grows in tandem with the evolution and adoption of artificial intelligence, Lucia predicts chipmakers will prioritize energy efficiency for improved longevity and performance; they’ll also be forced to address sustainable manufacturing in semiconductor fabs to address environmental issues such as water runoff and carbon footprints.

Computerworld spoke with Lucia about the state of the CHIPS Act and the future of chip manufacturing. The following are excerpts from that interview.

Why do you believe President Biden has held off on actually disbursing the CHIPS Act funding? “I wouldn’t want to speculate on anything related to the enactment of government policy. I can tell you relative to the enactment of CHIPS Act…that I think there’s a big opportunity, whether it’s the CHIPS Act or something else. There’s a lot of opportunity for big-time innovation, but you need a lot of money to get this stuff done.

“So, while I’m not a political pundit, I think a big allocation of resources going into the domestic semiconductor industry is a great way to support innovation and to level up across the entire industry — from innovation to manufacturing and everything in between.”

How can the current administration get the funds distributed over the next two months? “I believe he’s on a very tight schedule. I think that you have to get the funding out there. It’s important to support the innovation economy around the semiconductor industry. It would be a real boon for the industry, whether through the CHIPS Act or not; it’s important to have that big allocation of resources into the semiconductor industry…. That means university innovation, basic research and start-up companies.

“It’s also about growing the ecosystem, and this is where I think the resources really begin to pay off — in developing new standards and new processes, supporting things like advanced manufacturing and new technologies like chiplets and advanced packaging.

“When I choose a process node through which I will implement my semiconductor product, I’m compelled by pricing, competitive performance and efficiency, time to market, and the complexity on the business side for manufacturing.”

How do you see chiplet-based processor packaging playing into the future success of the US semiconductor industry? “For different components of my system, I may choose to make one chiplet in one technology node and a second chiplet in another technology node because they offer different advantages from a technology perspective. The opportunity with advanced packaging of chiplet technology is you can integrate multiple heterogeneous chiplets together; they can come from different fabs. It’s very cool.

“Then you put it into a layer called an interposer and that’s something you use to glue the chiplets together and also communicate between them. So it gives them channels and wires to talk back and forth. When you do that, you can produce very sophisticated designs that can take advantage of the best options in the market.

“It’s also supportive of an ecosystem where a company like Efficient can produce a chiplet implementation of our Fabric architecture, which is the biggest value in our design, and distribute that broadly. In the old days, even today, the way that typically happens is by selling licenses to the IP inside of your chip. So, that means I talk to a customer developing a chip and I can sell them design code resources and resources to use our architecture.

“Chiplets change the game. They say we can now produce a piece of hardware and sell that as a bare die off the manufacturing line, and you can integrate that into your heterogeneous chiplet-based product. So, it supports this innovation ecosystem where you can have many suppliers of chiplets with different capabilities and you can have a much simpler integration path. That path is emerging and it’s a very important piece of the innovation ecosystem moving forward.”

Shutterstock/Pete Hansen

How do sustainability efforts factor into the future of semiconductor production? “There are several dimensions to sustainability when it comes to manufacturing and operating semiconductors. The first is carbon emissions [which is] wrapped up in production and distribution of semiconductor parts. We call that the embodied system in production. That’s all the carbon emissions accounted for in the production and distribution.

“Then you have operational carbon emissions. This gets a lot of attention in the media because of the enormous amounts of energy that go into running data centers handling AI functions. So, you have those two categories and any system represents a point in the tradeoff of the space between those. You can produce more specialized chips that increase the amount of embodied carbon. You have special purpose accelerators for every function of AI you may want to do in a data center. Each of them would have potentially higher speed and efficiency, so that decreases their operational carbon.

“But the embodied carbon in a system that has that many chips is higher because we had to design, manufacture and distribute each of those different designs, and so the costs go up.”

Which semiconductor manufacturer has the best chance of re-shoring its manufacturing in the US? “I think there [are] a lot of interesting things going on inside Intel right now. I think they’re at an important moment in their existence. I think they’re pushing innovation in trying to develop what I think is the next generation and the generation after that in retail foundry services and manufacturing tech nodes. The conversation tends to turn toward their 18A node, which is a very advanced tech node. I think that will be a big win when Intel stands up manufacturing in the US. That turns into a roadmap for the future.

“Then you can’t have [that] conversation without talking about TSMC in the southwest with their massive fabrication implantation effort going on there. When that comes online, that will bring some of most advanced tech nodes that exist today to domestic production, and that’s important for a variety of reasons. I think over next few years the onshoring of semiconductor manufacturing for defense and security applications will be very important given the geopolitical state of the world today.”

Brandon Lucia

Trump wants the federal government to put tariffs on overseas semiconductor makers who ship their products to the US instead of funding companies to incentivize chips manufacturing here. Do you agree? “I think in order to answer that question, I’d have to be more tied into the function of government and the foundation for the tariffs. What I can say is both are approaches attempt to get at the same end point.

“I think getting the resources in to support the semiconductor manufacturing industry is incredibly important. Those are two ways to do that, but there are many other ways to grow the domestic ecosystem through policy, industry efforts and advanced packaging techniques.

“Regardless of the mechanism, I think the need is there. I think what we need are resources to do basic research and take those ideas and put them into innovative start-up companies, even in support of incumbent [companies] in expanding their efforts in advanced manufacturing and foundries. Again, we’re seeing that with Intel and their 18A chip and TSMC nodes that will be manufactured in the southwest.

What kind of a thriving ecosystem is needed to support a healthy domestic semiconductor industry? “I have a strong belief in fundamental research in academia and industry as a driver of this. You have successful examples in some of the bigger companies with research arms and many examples of big ideas emerging from more basic research that happens in academia settings.

“It’s really driven economically, but also by things like the National Science Foundation directly supporting early-stage research that can be 10 years out from commercialization of a product sometimes. Much of what we’re doing at Efficient…was funded through the National Science Foundation. It goes back almost a decade.

“The other leg here is a thriving ecosystem of start-ups and an environment in which they can grow and produce value. You put all those things together and it’s a very big roadmap to how we could revolutionize the semiconductor industry. We can do fabrication of advanced nodes and packaging. This a la carte idea allows for new markets to emerge around this chiplet packaging technology.

“Then you have the ability for a startup to launch in a straightforward way to bring technology like that to market. Over a five-year window, a company could emerge and tap into all that research and tap into fabrication and manufacturing ecosystem to produce something that’s really new and has a lot of value.

“This is really our origin story. We came from the result of research that went on for nearly a decade. We realized we were doing something new that was untapped in the market today.”

Is your company’s design based on chiplets? “Right now, ours is not a chiplet-based design. In the future, we see a big opportunity for going into Chiplet integration. Our architecture is called Fabric and it’s a way of mapping computation in space across computing resources implemented in a chip. The basic idea is we have our architecture and it’s scalable to include more computing resources, and without decreasing efficiency, we can increase the performance in a chip.

“With chiplet technology, we can have multiple chiplets on our fabric architected together, which is a big opportunity for us to scale up from where we are today, which is focused on embedded applications and things like infrastructure, and wearables and space and defense applications. We can scale up further toward the edge, maybe even edge-cloud and, some day, data center applications.”