The next national shortage? Skilled semiconductor chip labor.
How one university is powering the talent pipeline with work-ready engineers.
By Brandy Salmon, Virginia Tech associate vice president of innovation and partnerships
As companies around the world launch plans to onshore semiconductor chip production, a new challenge is quickly being revealed—a shortage of labor skilled in semiconductor technology. In the United States alone, companies will face a shortfall of 300,000 engineers and nearly 90,000 skilled technicians by 2030, according to McKinsey & Company.
Virginia Tech is stepping up to fill the pipeline by preparing students through a pioneering new Chips-Scale Integration program, infusing industry-inspired learning in the classroom and propelling use-inspired research. This comes just in time, as the historic CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 passes, which includes a $52 billion investment to lower the cost of goods, create higher-paying manufacturing jobs and ensure more of these critical technologies are created domestically.
In a recent visit to Virginia Tech, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime advocate of investing in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, praised the university for its work to unite the public and private sectors through its research and industry partnerships in both Blacksburg, Va. and the Washington, D.C. metro area.
“Our nation must maintain international leadership in advancing technology. The CHIPS and Science Act is a huge step forward,” said U.S. Senator Warner. “Virginia Tech is doing groundbreaking work in this area, and it’s exciting to learn more about opportunities to collaborate.”
Access to talent is proving to be a major factor in company expansion, a reality illustrated by Amazon’s 2018 selection of Northern Virginia for its HQ2 based, in part, on the commitment by the state of Virginia to double the tech talent pipeline through a $1 billion investment in higher education. Since then, a number of other major moves have been based on workforce readiness, including Intel’s recent decision to invest $20 billion in two new leading-edge chip factories in Ohio.
Pioneering a new approach
Ranked No. 4 in the nation for producing the most undergraduates in computer engineering according to the American Society of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech’s computer engineering program is known for providing hands-on opportunities for students via internships, a legacy of world-class research and its team-based, multidisciplinary approach.
“Through our long-standing tradition of research excellence and industry partnerships, we understand the importance of empowering the next generation of engineers who know how to design and manufacture chips. That’s what Virginia Tech’s Chip-Scale Integration curriculum has been doing since 2016,” said Luke Lester, Virginia Tech’s Department Head of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The Chip-Scale Integration program is one of 14 specialized majors in electrical engineering and computer engineering that resulted from the National Science Foundation’s ambitious Revolutionizing Engineering Departments grant. The major was built for students who are seeking to harness innovative advances in integrated digital and analog electronics to add greater functionality, improve performance, minimize power consumption and expand applications.
The NSF-supported curriculum aims to transform the traditional engineering education curriculum model and emphasizes design and innovation approaches, “enabling students in the Chips-Scale major to tailor their choice of courses to their own career goals by drilling into more depth in transistor manufacturing or computer-aided design tools, or by connecting it to application areas such as cybersecurity and entertainment, or even by linking it to areas outside of electrical and computer engineering, such as green engineering and patent law,” said Tom Martin, a Virginia Tech professor who helped develop the curriculum.
Virginia Tech students in this transformative program are collaborating across disciplines while learning from faculty and industry experts in manufacturing, chip design, packaging and power, and graduate ready to apply domain expertise in the highly complex field of systems design and integration.
“Our students gain the creative skills to keep in mind the bigger picture, skills that our industry partners tell us are critical to success in the coming years,” Martin said.
Scaling up investment
While the national semiconductor labor shortage may quickly become a constraint, the Commonwealth of Virginia and Virginia Tech have been long aware of the need for academic institutions to scale up quickly.
It’s a major impetus behind the commonwealth’s tech-talent initiative, in which Virginia Tech has made an intentional commitment to substantially increase undergraduate and graduate degree production while developing new accelerated masters-level degree programs. Since 2018, Virginia Tech’s undergraduate enrollment in computer engineering and computer science has increased by 53 percent and master’s degree enrollment in both disciplines has more than doubled.
Additionally, Virginia Tech has partnered with other universities to increase access to future high-demand, high paying jobs through a 4+1 accelerated undergraduate and master’s degree program. With foundational coursework accomplished as undergraduates, students are prepared for early admission to master of engineering programs, graduating in five years with both undergraduate and master’s degrees. For working professionals, Virginia Tech offers part-time options over two or three years. In all cases, the Master of Engineering degrees allow students to gain hands-on experience by tackling industry-sponsored, project-based learning so that they are ready to contribute to their future employers on day one.
With a growing presence in the greater Washington, D.C., metro area, Virginia Tech is combining a tradition of research and talent development with new pioneering programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
Front and center research focus
Virginia Tech’s semiconductor-related research is a prime example of the importance of semiconductor chips in our everyday lives, as well as the steps being taken to address the ongoing shortage.
For example, Masoud Agah, the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium professor of engineering, is developing a skin sensor that can detect volatile organic compounds being emitted from human skin for biomarker discovery and disease diagnoses.
Also, recently four faculty members were awarded a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant as part of a flagship program: Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams (ASCENT), which supports transformative collaborative research to fuel progress in engineering applications with high societal impacts. This year, the program focuses on future semiconductor technologies, and the group of Virginia Tech researchers has proposed optically-driven ultra-wide bandgap power semiconductor and packaging technologies for power electronics for the power grid.
In terms of long-standing research in this area, the Virginia Tech Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) has made contributions resulting in technologies that are incorporated in virtually every device including voltage regulators in microprocessors that are in high-end graphics processors, memory devices, telecommunication networks and all forms of mobile electronics.
“Power semiconductor devices are at the heart of power electronics converters, which are essential for electric vehicles, integration of renewable energy and energy storage, data centers and all of our electronic devices,” said Christina DiMarino, an assistant professor and CPES researcher. “New power semiconductors enable greater power efficiency, new functionality and smaller size and weight, resulting in improved performance of these technologies and systems.”
DiMarino, who obtained her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, is creating more effective solutions to improve power grid sustainability through innovative approaches to power conversion and related technologies, like semiconductors.
The packaging of these semiconductor devices is also critical to their performance. Virginia Tech’s new semiconductor packaging lab in Arlington, Va. is researching advanced packaging technologies for emerging semiconductor devices that will enable faster switching, higher efficiency, greater power density and improved reliability.
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Virginia Tech is combining a tradition of research and talent development with new pioneering programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
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