Q&A with the University of Minnesota's chief semiconductor officer

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How have you seen things change in the field since the law was passed, and what are your hopes for five, ten years down the line?

It's good to see a resurgence of domestic manufacturing. But this sort of onshoring or reshoring of the the industry, it's not going to happen overnight.

• Semiconductor fabs are very, very complex, and so it's going to be really trying to play the long game as we try to bring this industry back.
• This is going to be a multi-year, maybe even a multi-decade endeavor.

What kind of work are you doing at the university related to the CHIPS Act right now?

Now that the CHIPS Act is coming along, there's a lot of funding opportunities.

• One area at the University of Minnesota that's a particular expertise is the area of spintronics.
• You can think of it as maybe little micro magnets or nano magnets, kind of switching back and forth, pointing up or pointing down. They're interesting for some novel, say, memory applications.
• So one area might be in radiation-hardened electronics, something that could go into space and still function. There's a lot of interest in this in the microelectronics industry.

What happens when CHIPS money runs out?

I think it would be a mistake to let it run out, or at least to not be thinking about what happens after the CHIPS Act.

• We can already see that there's a lot of lot of good things that are happening.
• There's money flowing, and I think that that's really feeding a lot of the innovation that's happening.

What policy solutions would you want to suggest to lawmakers in D.C. to help the industry and attract talent?

We can't be too short-sighted. It has to be understood, at least at the government level, that this is not a short-term activity.

• The CHIPS and Science Act should be just the beginning of a longer term investment in this reshoring of domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
• You can't just say, "Well, we passed the CHIPS and Science Act and now we're done."
• Second, as a university professor and a researcher, it's really important to think about how we can have these university-industry partnerships and ways that we can feed this innovation pipeline.

How are you trying to position the state as a hub for the semiconductor and microelectronics industry?

I think that Minnesota's done a good job of investing. We have a really exciting ecosystem here with several midsize semiconductor fabs that are all co-located, all having different areas of expertise.

• Minnesota has the potential to be a new leader in the semiconductor industry.
• What's happening at Polar Semiconductor [with the CHIPS Act award] is really exciting. There's going to be tremendous opportunities as they expand and become a new foundry that's going to be able to feed a lot of innovation into this ecosystem.