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As CEOs of the leading chip companies signed a letter to U.S. President Biden urging him to prioritize funding for semiconductor manufacturing and research, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki said late last week in a press briefing that industry should expect an executive order to be signed within weeks.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) board of directors, CEOs and senior executives at leading chip companies sent a letter to President Biden urging him to include substantial funding for semiconductor manufacturing and research in the administration’s economic recovery and infrastructure plan. SIA represents 98 percent of the U.S. semiconductor industry by revenue.
The context laid out in the letter said the share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the U.S. had decreased from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent today. “This decline is largely due to substantial subsidies offered by the governments of our global competitors, which have placed the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage in attracting new fab construction. In addition, federal investment in semiconductor research has been flat, while other governments have invested substantially in research initiatives to strengthen their own semiconductor capabilities.”
The SIA letter urges President Biden to prioritize semiconductor investment to reassert U.S. technological leadership and fulfill the goals of the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” plan. The CEO signatories on the letter are from AMD, Analog Devices, Cree, GlobalFoundries, Intel, Lattice Semiconductor, Marvell Semiconductor, Maxim, Micron Technology, ON Semiconductor, Qorvo, Qualcomm, Silicon Labs, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, Western Digital, Xilinx and the SIA. In addition, senior executives from Broadcom, IBM and Nvidia also added their signatures.
Onshore chip manufacturing would also alleviate some of the sourcing problems plaguing the electronics supply chain. Trade restrictions have limited U.S. access to semiconductors and fab capacity originating in China.
The rest of this article can be found on EETimes.
