As one of the few bipartisan bills to make it through the last Congress, the CHIPs and Science Act offers amazing opportunities for companies within the larger photonics community. What’s important is that it represents actual funding dollars with both authorization and appropriation.
The result? “Big numbers that will be going out into our community,” says SPIE’s Jennifer O’Bryan (see video). Big picture, the act represents $50 billion to cover the Chips for America component, including an incentive as well as an R&D program; $2 billion for the Chips for American Defense Fund; $500 million for international cooperation; and $200 million for the workforce of education fund that’s going to the National Science Foundation.
When looking into the incentives program, $39 billion is set aside with allocation over the next 5 years. Some criteria to keep in mind: the program includes upstream suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing materials, which is hugely important to the photonics community. “Entities should have plans in place to mitigate supply chain risks. If you are planning on applying, you should consider having those plans in place,” she says. “This also prohibits recipients of incentive funds from expanding or building new manufacturing capacity for certain advanced semiconductors in specific countries that present a national security threat to the U.S. for 10 years. They are definitely referring to China.”
There is $11 billion set aside for R&D programs. This includes National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program, the Semiconductor Manufacturing USA Institutes, and Microelectronic Research at NIST. “NIST has some flexibility in how it divides the funding,” she says. When looking at the goal of NSTC, the focus is on research and engineering on challenging projects with a time horizon beyond 5 years, making it a forward-looking center.
For anyone wanting to do a deeper dive to learn more about how their company can get involved, O’Bryan recommended visiting www.chips.gov, where you can find all the pertinent resources on the funding.
O’Bryan also briefly touched on a science authorization, which usually is lumped into the sum when discussing the overall value of the comprehensive bill. “Unfortunately, that’s not really a fair characterization because this is portion does not have appropriated funding,” she says.
