(Press-News.org) ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories has joined a new partnership aimed at helping the United States regain its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing.
While the U.S. was considered a powerhouse in chip production in the 1990s, fabricating more than 35% of the world’s semiconductors, that share has since dropped to 12%. Today, the U.S. manufactures none of the world’s most advanced chips which power technologies like smartphones, owned by 71% of the world’s population, as well as self-driving cars, quantum computers, and artificial intelligence-powered devices and programs.
Sandia hopes to help change that. It recently became the first national lab to join the U.S. National Semiconductor Technology Center. The NSTC was established under the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate innovation and address some of the country’s most pressing technology challenges.
“We have pioneered the way for other labs to join,” said Mary Monson, Sandia’s senior manager of Technology Partnerships and Business Development. “The CHIPS Act has brought the band back together, you could say. By including the national labs, U.S. companies, and academia, it’s really a force multiplier.”
Sandia has a long history of contributing to the semiconductor industry through research and development partnerships, its Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications facility known as MESA, and its advanced cleanrooms for developing next-generation technologies. Through its NSTC partnerships, Sandia hopes to strengthen U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and research and development, enhance national security production, and foster the innovation of new technologies that sets the nation apart globally.
“The big goal is to strengthen capabilities. Industry is moving fast, so we are keeping abreast of everything happening and incorporating what will help us deliver more efficiently on our national security mission. It’s about looking at innovative ways of partnering and expediting the process,” Monson said.
The urgency of the effort is evident. The pandemic provided a perfect example, as car lots were left bare and manufacturers sat idle, waiting for chips to be produced to build new vehicles.
“An average car contains 1,400 chips and electric vehicles use more than 3,000,” said Rick McCormick, Sandia’s senior scientist for semiconductor technology strategy. McCormick is helping lead Sandia’s new role. “Other nations around the globe are investing more than $300 billion to be leaders in semiconductor manufacturing. The U.S. CHIPS Act is our way of ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ One goal is for the U.S. to have more than 25% of the global capacity for state-of-the-art chips by 2032.”
Sandia is positioned to play a key role in creating the chips of the future.
“More than $12 billion in research and development spending is planned under CHIPS, including a $3 billion program to create an ecosystem for packaging assemblies of chiplets,” McCormick said. “These chiplets communicate at low energy and high speed as if they were a large expensive chip.”
Modern commercial AI processors use this approach, and Sandia’s resources and partnerships can help expand access to small companies and national security applications. MESA already fabricates high-reliability chiplet assembly products for the stockpile and nonproliferation applications.
McCormick said Sandia could also play a major role in training the workforce of the future. The government has invested billions of dollars in new factories, all of which need to be staffed by STEM students.
“There is a potential crisis looming,” McCormick said. “The Semiconductor Industry Association anticipates that the U.S. will need 60,000 to 70,000 more workers, so we need to help engage the STEM workforce. That effort will also help Sandia bolster its staffing pipeline.”
As part of its membership, Sandia will offer access to some of its facilities to other NSTC members, fostering collaboration and partnerships. Tech transfer is a core part of Sandia’s missions, and this initiative will build on that by helping private partners increase their stake in the industry while enabling Sandia to build on its own mission.
“We will be helping develop suppliers and strengthen our capabilities,” Monson said. “We are a government resource for semiconductor knowledge. We are in this evolving landscape and have a front row seat to what it will look like over the next 20 years. We are helping support technology and strengthening our national security capabilities and mission delivery.”
END
Sandia to help propel US semiconductor manufacturing
2025-06-12
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Wet soils increase flooding during atmospheric river storms
2025-06-12
Atmospheric rivers are responsible for most flooding on the West Coast of the U.S., but also bring much needed moisture to the region. The size of these storms doesn’t always translate to flood risk, however, as other factors on the ground play important roles. Now, a new study helps untangle the other drivers of flooding to help communities and water managers better prepare.
The research, published June 4 in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, analyzed more than 43,000 atmospheric river storms across 122 watersheds on the West Coast between 1980 and 2023. The researchers found that one ...
Turning carbon dioxide into fuel just got easier, thanks to acid bubbles
2025-06-12
A team of researchers at Rice University have discovered a surprisingly simple method for vastly improving the stability of electrochemical devices that convert carbon dioxide into useful fuels and chemicals, and it involves nothing more than sending the CO 2 through an acid bubbler.
Their study, published in Science, addresses a major bottleneck in the performance and stability of CO 2 reduction systems: the buildup of salt that clogs gas flow channels, reduces efficiency and causes the ...
Symmetrical crystals can absorb light asymmetrically
2025-06-12
Just when scientists thought they knew everything about crystals, a Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin-Madison collaboration has uncovered a hidden secret.
Centrosymmetric crystals are a special type of material that is fully symmetrical in every direction from a central point. Previously, scientists thought only non-centrosymmetric materials could exhibit chiral behavior — a property in which an object acts differently from its mirror reflection. But, for the first time, researchers ...
Platform rapidly designs organ-scale vasculature trees for 3D bioprinting
2025-06-12
Zachary Sexton and colleagues have developed a design platform that can rapidly generate vasculature trees that can then be bioprinted and used to successfully perfuse living tissue constructs. The platform improves the design and production of complex vascular networks that will be needed for manufacturing human tissues and organs in the future. As the researchers note, the manufacture of tissues with multiple cell types has improved recently. But like a city needs a full complement of main highways, side streets, and alleyways to carry traffic its furthest reaches, ...
Inland, coastal regions have an overlooked role in nitrogen fixation
2025-06-12
A new evaluation of biological nitrogen fixation for inland and coastal waters concludes that these habitats are an overlooked but important source of fixation globally. Robinson Fulweiler and colleagues found that despite accounting for less than 10% of the globe’s surface area, inland and coastal aquatic systems create about 15% of the nitrogen fixed on land and in the open ocean. Biological nitrogen fixation is the microbial process that makes inert nitrogen gas available to organisms, fueling primary production and enhancing carbon ...
Ribosome profiling identifies thousands of new viral protein-coding sequences
2025-06-12
With the help of a technique called Massively Parallel Ribosome Profiling (MPRP), Shira Weingarten-Gabbay and colleagues identified more than 4000 open reading frames (ORFs) across 679 human-associated viral genomes. ORFs are a stretch of genetic material that can encode a protein. Researchers need to know more about viral proteomics to better understand viral effects on the immune system and to develop vaccines. But ORFs are notoriously difficult to detect in viruses using traditional computational methods, and the viruses themselves can be too dangerous to cultivate in a lab for experimental studies. To ...
Recent litigation has implications for medical artificial intelligence manufacturing
2025-06-12
Although there is no direct case law on liability using medical AI, the recent products liability case Dickson v. Dexcom Inc. may hold some lessons on future liability risk for manufacturers incorporating AI or machine learning (ML) technologies, according to Sara Gerke and David Simon. This legal finding could influence which products in this space are developed and marketed, with impacts on research and development and resulting benefits to the public. In this Policy Forum, Gerke and Simon discuss the case, which is the first to hold that federal law can preempt personal injury ...
Knot good: How cells untie DNA to protect the genome
2025-06-12
Not all DNA looks like the familiar twisted ladder. Sometimes, parts of our genetic code fold into unusual shapes. One such structure, the G-quadruplex (G4), looks like a knot. These knots can play important roles in turning genes on or off. But if not untangled in time, they can harm our genome. Now, researchers from the Knipscheer Group at the Hubrecht Institute, in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute, have uncovered a surprising mechanism that keeps these knots in check. Their work, published in Science on June 12th, could lead to new ways to treat diseases like cancer.
Our DNA is usually shaped like a double ...
When bacteria get hungry, they kill – and eat – their neighbors
2025-06-12
Scientists have discovered a gruesome microbial survival strategy: when food is scarce, some bacteria kill and consume their neighbors.
The study, published June 12 in Science, was conducted by an international team from Arizona State University, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag). The researchers show that under nutrient-limited conditions, bacteria use a specialized weapon — the Type VI Secretion System (T6SS) — to attack, kill, and slowly absorb nutrients from other bacterial cells.
"The ...
Scientists discover smart ‘switch’ in plants that allows them to redirect roots to find water
2025-06-12
Scientists have discovered a rapid molecular switch in plant roots that allows them to detect dry soils and redirect root growth to find water. This discovery could help in developing drought-resilient crops and addressing future food security challenges.
Roots typically branch out in response to moisture in the soil, foraging for water and nutrients. However, when the growing root loses contact with moist soil, it temporarily halts the formation of lateral branches. This smart response helps plants redirect their root growth toward areas with higher water availability.
In ...