CHIPS office eyes $100 million competition focused on manufacturing and AI

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s CHIPS Research and Development Office plans to initiate competition with up to $100 million in funding focused on the sustainable manufacturing of semiconductor chips and artificial intelligence, according to a posting to the Federal Register published Wednesday. 

The upcoming Notice of Funding Opportunity is meant to boost support for new materials in chip manufacturing and comes as the Biden administration continues to invest in the domestic tech industry. The effort will focus on improving the performance of new chips and increasing the quantity of chips that can be manufactured, as well as on addressing issues with energy and water efficiency and other environmental concerns raised by chip manufacturing. 

There is a particular emphasis on artificial intelligence-powered autonomous experimentation, or AI/AE, an approach meant to accelerate the design and construction of new chip manufacturing technologies. The hope is to work against typically slow development timelines in the chip industry, which stand to hamper American semiconductor industrial policy goals. 

There’s growing concern that just over 10% of the world’s chips are now made in the United States, a sharp decline from decades earlier. The CHIPS Act, and subsequent efforts like AI/AE competition, are supposed to reverse — or at least mitigate — this trend. 

“If successful, these techniques can enable the co-optimization during materials discovery of multiple metrics important to next-generation microelectronics including microelectronics performance, manufacturing readiness, manufacturing economics, human health and safety, and environmental impact, including but not limited to PFAS mitigation and elimination, waste reduction and manufacturing water/energy efficiency,” the posting explains.

It continues: “By leveraging AI/AE and working in close partnerships with industry, CHIPS R&D intends to allow for the more rapid and cost-efficient discovery, design, validation, and deployment of sustainable materials and processes compared to traditional R&D approaches.”

Money appropriated toward the competition is supposed go toward the purchase of new equipment at universities, new technologies, expanded workforce, and other basic and applied research. Ultimately, the office hopes to fund at least two awards.