 To get started, we have a lot of ground to cover today. I'm Mark Lundstrom. I'm a professor at Purdue and a member of the organizing committee. And I want to welcome you to what promises to be a very interesting and lively discussion on a really important topic. So as we all know, the US is making plans to reshore and re-energize its microelectronics industry. Universities will play an important role in many different ways in this effort. But perhaps the most important role will be to develop a new generation of microelectronics engineers and technicians. And that will be absolutely critical to the success of this effort. So as we and universities begin to make plans to address this challenge, we organize this workshop to hear from our colleagues in the industry and government their perspectives on the needs, the opportunities, the challenges, the programs that will be available to support these efforts. We have an outstanding group of panelists and moderators. And I really want to thank them for making time in their busy calendars to participate in this discussion. So to kick things off, I want to introduce Meng Cheng, the John A. Edwardson, dean of engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives at Purdue, to say a few words from his perspective as a dean of engineering and as someone who recently spent a year in Washington as these discussions were getting underway. Meng? Thank you very much, Mark. I hope you can hear me. Yes, we can. Great to see all of you. And thank you, Mark, for you and your team's leadership working with our partners to create the first of the series of workshops on a very important and timely topic. And I know that there are friends from academia, industry, and government with us today. Thank you for joining us. As Mark mentioned, my name is Meng Cheng. I'm an EVP and the dean of College of Engineering at Purdue University. And in year 2020, I spent a year of sabbatical serving the country in the State Department and participated in that reshoring and re-energizing the semiconductor micro-electronic manufacturing industry in the United States. We all know that CHIPS is the hardest to get to these days. It is critical to our national security, job security, and economic security. We also know that tens of billions of federal resources in this country and likely hundreds of billions of investment from private sector will be pouring into the semiconductors industry this decade. And we know that one of the most important supply chains is that of human talent and workforce development. How do we find tens of thousands of new semiconductor industry engineers throughout the whole supply chain in order to make the best use of those hundreds of billions of dollars of investment? And that brings us to today's day-long workshop. Like many of our friends in academia across the country, we are moving quickly to help address this challenge on workforce and human talent pipeline. For example, we announced two months ago that Purdue Engineering is launching a new set of degrees and credentials that are interdisciplinary across electrical, computer, chemical, material, and mechanical engineering to cover the entire food chain from tools, materials, to design, to manufacturing, to packaging in dedicated new set of master degrees, undergraduate minors, and graduate certificates, both in residence and through online learning. And along with Department of Defense, partnership with a dozen universities, Purdue is leading the scale program, SCALE, to develop a trained and clearable workforce in trusted, assured microelectronics. Along with our colleagues in industry, we look forward to the discussion today for insights and guidance as we launch these programs. And they must involve partnership across federal, state government, industry partners, and academia partners. We've got a great set of exceptionally qualified panelists and moderators for today's discussion. And I want to thank all of them for taking the time. Panel one will be looking at where the microelectronics industry is headed in order to identify the most crucial opportunities and skills needed for the workforce. Panel two will focus on commercial workforce development and panel three on workforce for defense electronics. Now before we start with panel one, I would like to introduce Mr. David Roberts, my great colleague and friend and a fellow Hoosier here, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, IEDC, to say a few words about how states, such as Indiana, see the coming opportunities in semiconductors. Over to you, Dave. Oh, thank you, Dean Chang. That's very kind of you to say. Thank you for inviting me to participate. And thank you for your visionary leadership at Purdue, for your service to our country at the State Department during a tumultuous 2020. But I think as you already knew and maybe learned there and even greater capacity chips are one of the critical infrastructure needs of our time, along with reliable electrical grid and high-speed low-latency communication architecture. And I'm happy to report that here in Indiana, I'm honored to serve the state as a Chief Innovation Officer. And in other places that might imply that I have some answers, but I think you'll find if you don't already know that Hoosiers believe that we reach the best answers together and that the government should listen at least twice as much as we speak. So what I will say though, at the opening here is that as we've listened to you, to your colleagues at Purdue, experts at our other institutions, such as Notre Dame, Rose Holman, IU, Ivy Tech on Technician and Operating and the operator side of the consideration, our friends at Crane, some great industry experts and friends like Ian Staff and Ron Goldblatt, Mark Lewis, George Scalise, that the names continue on and on of the folks that we've tried to work with and learn from. And what we've done is more deeply understood the criticality of chips to the end users that are key to our own state's economy. And just as an example, we have the second highest growth state product related to mobility behind only Michigan and the chip supply chain challenges have taken us to a point where OEM facilities throughout our state have suffered and had temporary production causes and temporary layoffs of their workers. And the same is true for the RV industry and to some degree the medical device sector. This is of great importance to us, but we're thrilled to see activity like research at Purdue and Notre Dame being supported by SRC and DARPA. And in all of that, we understand federal and state government leadership is important. That's why Governor Holcomb and an op-ed recently in the Hills supporting Chips Act funding and why our governor is planning to form a group that will advise his office on the specific needs of workforce in the semiconductor industry. So look for more information on that in the very near future. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that we are honored to welcome companies like Skywater and Enhanced Semi who just this week announced new activity here in Indiana and are growing a cluster of semiconductor companies that are designing, making and testing chips that our end users need. We're also encouraged by the support. I mentioned the name earlier of an industry veteran and Purdue alum, George Scalise to help establish an entity called the Semiconductor Innovation Center that will guide our state strategy into the future. And so with that, I want to thank you. Thank you again. Thanks for everyone coming today and actively engaging in this semiconductor industry's growth here in the state. I want to thank you also for the work that you're doing to serve the national interests of the United States. And so with that, I wish you a great day and I'll send it back to Mark Lindstrom. Thank you, Dave and thank you, Mom. So we're ready to get panel one started. And to do that, I'd like to introduce panel one moderator, Dr. Bill Chappell. Bill is CTO of Microsoft Azure Global. Also vice president, I'm CTO of Azure Global and vice president of mission systems at Microsoft. Prior to that, Bill was the director of the Micro Systems Technology Office at DARPA. And prior to that, I'm proud to say he was my faculty colleague here at Purdue. So with that, I'll turn it over to Bill and we will get panel one started. Appreciate that, Mark. Yeah, I miss my days of Purdue being your colleague that was definitely a highlight of my career. And since then, I've been focused on areas such as this and it's definitely a passion project of mine and it's a great honor to be able to host and bring together a really good set of perspectives across our industry. I wanna introduce my panelists first and then we're gonna have them dive in and give their perspectives on where we sit in this specific moment in time. Our panel is meant to set the table for today where we try to look out of where we sit today and where we're heading as an industry. And to do that, we were very lucky to be able to get the right perspectives. Deidre Hansard is from Synopsys as the Chief Security Officer. So as we are looking at semiconductors, we have real strength in this country in design and EDA. But as we look where we have challenges, we also wanna look at where we have strengths and how do we maintain those strengths or pivot off of those strengths. So she will be representing the EDA market and the design community. Chandra Mooli, Senior Fellow and Manager R&D Devices at Micron Technology. So Micron has been the strength of our memory in this country for the last, you know, as far as I've been paying attention and put it that way. So it's a very strong pillar in which we have had as an anchor within this country. Mark Papermaster joins us as the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Technology Engineering for AMD. And the rise of AMD in the last couple of years has been a real strength as well as they have grown with leaps and bounds. So that represents sort of the large chip design and the manufacturer of very large scale chips that are competing at the highest levels. Sri Ramaswamy is the Senior Policy Advisor representing the government. She is the Senior Policy Advisor at the Office of Policy and Strategic Planning for the US Department of Commerce. So as we sit in this very special moment in the government, it's gonna have a very strong influence on where we had commerce is gonna take a lead in that. And Sri represents, and it's really where a lot of the discussions is the epicenter of a lot of those discussions at commerce, so we're glad we'll have Sri. And last but not least, Thomas Sonderman, the President and CEO of SkyWater Technology. And so we have real strength also in this country in smaller flexible fabs that can do some really interesting and exotic capabilities. And so how do we make sure we're looking at advanced CMOS and how do we take care of that race, which is a real difficult race to run while you also look at the flexibility and viability of some of the other manufacturers in this country. And so Thomas is gonna be able to represent that point of view. So we have this really great panel that I think represents all of the breadth of the electronics industry. Myself, I will be the host and leading the discussion. As Mark said, I was at Purdue, I was in academia, went into the government, focused on these things. I'm now in a corporate environment. And so I get to see things from different perspectives. And this area has always been a passion of mine. We started ERI, the electronics resurgence initiative, specifically trying to address the research challenges, both funding universities to fund that next generation students, but more importantly, really looking at this time, not as a fallow period where Moore's law has a bunch of challenges. It's like, how do you take this end of, or the unique dynamics of where we're at with the scaling of CMOS and really look at that as an opportunity and how do you get creative and how do you not say, well, we're just gonna push into the software stack and just do a bunch of work there on a stagnant electronic space. How do we actually look at all of the different vectors of progress from the design community, from novel devices, from packaging and how do we build a collective national effort which we branded ERI. What's interesting to me is we used to sit in the Pentagon or at DARPA and think, how do we engage with commercial industry? They've got their global multinationals, they're doing their thing. Here we have a bunch of defense channels. I think I actually hit the dial the moment you're talking to me. And so we would sit there and try to figure out how are we gonna work across these lines? Government has certain needs, commercial have different needs and sometimes there are dots, the pace of development are at odds. But here you sit 10 years later from some of those conversations and there's deep partnerships between the government and industry. People are squarely focused on supply chain. Whether you're developing chips or not, across the entire stack, there's a intense focus on where the chips are gonna come from. What is the workforce that's gonna develop those chips and how do you make sure you have a diversity across the globe? And so it's been an interesting decade from those early conversations of how do we actually engage to where we're set today where we very easily were able to pull together a panel of experts because they care enough that they really wanna have their voice heard. Whereas in the past it's like, hey, how do we have this discussion between government and industry? So even at Microsoft, we are the end of the cycle. That meaning we just announced our top secret cloud working for the government as an example. Obviously then the chips that go into that, we care a lot about that entire chain. And so whether we're designing chips or not, we have to be a part of this entire cycle. So people like me, with an electrical engineering background, he's been a professor of Purdue, are part of what has historically been part of the software portion of the ecosystem and intensely focused on the chips that are being developed and how we make sure that they're getting into our systems securely. So today we will walk through the different perspectives and I'm gonna start with Deirdre. Deirdre has a lot to say about the role of design, but she's really just an expert to have been a part of this community from the very, I wanna say the beginning because I don't wanna talk about your age, but you've been there for as long as I've been paying attention, you're a pillar of the community. So I'm very interested to hear where you are. What are your thoughts on this moment in time? Thank you so much, Bill. And thank you all to all of our colleagues at Purdue and the industry for the opportunity to speak today. And Bill wanted us to talk about what's going on in this moment of time. So let me just spend a few minutes setting the stage from an EDA company's perspective. So I'm an executive in an EDA company. I've been at Synopsys for 34 years now. So I've grown up in this industry enabling the breakneck pace of design. So you have fabulous companies driving the state of the art. Now you increasingly have high performance compute, hyperscalar companies going vertical, following the course of companies like Apple that brought a lot of chip design in-house. You've got foundries that are pushing us constantly to now we're taping out five nanometer designs and the industry's moving to three nanometer and 18 angstrom. We're now in the age of angstrom which is kind of remarkable. And when you look at that performance that drives a whole cycle of innovation on an ongoing basis. Of course, the feature rich companies are designing at more mature nodes and really, really driving innovation in their own way. So all of this puts the EDA and the IP industry at the middle of that innovation. And our job is really to work with foundries and researchers and equipment companies to path find on new methodologies, new materials, new technology. So we can drive that state of the art. But we also need to work with our fabulous and hyperscalar companies to make sure that we are providing the ability to integrate all that into a design flow where the chip can actually get done. Bill actually mentioned something important that EDA is actually a treasured industry here in the United States. 80% of our industry revenue is US based. And we need to make sure that we recognize that when we look at all the challenges in our industry and our vertical, we need to recognize that EDA is a true strength for this whole ecosystem. So that's kind of the normal circle of life as I call it. We go to management review meetings with our foundry partners and they talk about the next generation technology and we say, oh my gosh, this is gonna be another tough road. And somehow we get it done collectively. But building modest to wax on too much about kind of state of the present. So I wanna talk about three trends that I see. One is 3DIC and heterogeneous integration. And I think we've been to many conferences this year, all virtual and fortunately, although some of them are becoming live where we're starting to see what pioneers did like Xilinx a few years ago and AMD has done. We need to broaden that capability beyond kind of the leaders that can drive state of the art in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration. We need to make that available through through chip lit methodologies through more advanced design flows through verification capabilities, et cetera. So I think we'll hear more about that from other parties on the panel. I think we also have an opportunity number two for new methods and AI and cloud are absolutely here. This is gonna drive the next level of productivity and capability for our industry. And it's something that we're gonna see truly accelerate over the next decade. So I'm really excited about the opportunities that that presents. And then I really as chief security officer at Synopsys I need to comment on supply chain security. And I think we'll hear from Sri later about, in the CIA, confidentiality, integrity and availability. There's a lot of obsession right now about availability. Now that's absolutely a consideration but we need to think about confidentiality and integrity in supply chain security as well. And so we need to think about designing, designing securely, manufacturing securely and then monitoring a device throughout its life cycle. And this is also a new trend that our partners in defense industrial base know very well. They understand that parts need to be secure and reliable, but more and more industries like automotive, like high performance compute are realizing that this isn't a trend that we absolutely need to comprehend in our overall design flow. So I feel a lot of excitement about what's happening in our industry but I also feel a huge amount of urgency because we need to maintain that innovative edge as we go forward in the next decade. That's it, they'll back to you or as they would say in government calls over. It's great. Thanks, Zedra. Look forward to asking you questions about some of the statements you made there but we're gonna move on to Chandra, representing the memory space but also a deep expert across the entire semiconductor industry. So Chandra, over to you. All right, thanks, Bill. Thanks for all the panelists to join this discussion today. I wanna focus on memory as a critical ingredient in the whole supply chain and specifically talk about where we are in time today in the memory industry. As everybody knows in this panel, right? Every semiconductor company, if you historically look at it has been doing memory, right? Intel brought the first DRAM chip to the world, right? So everybody has worked on memory, quite literally I can count more than 40, 50 companies working on various aspects of memory technology but today, if you look at it in time, Micron is the number one and the only one memory company in the Western world, okay? So if you really look at where we are I won't go through the list of our competition largely I would say we face significant competition from Korea, right? In Korea, memory industry is a national initiative. I mean, it's really been like that for several years and of course we are competing with them head on and I'm proud to say in Micron we have absolutely best in class memory products in both DRAM and NAND space and various aspects related to, you know variety of different memory products that we developed for the industries in various segments in compute and mobile in automotive and graphics and whole bunch of areas. Now, if you look at where we are today in time as I mentioned earlier we are of course facing a lot of competition from Korea and our scaling challenges are immense. As everybody knows in this panel, you know we have tried to break away from the lithography roadmap to really make vertical structures. In NAND, you know, it's well known that we have moved to 3D industry as a whole has moved to 3D and we are continuing to build, you know massive skyscrapers if you will, right? You know, enormous aspect ratio structures. In DRAM we are facing huge challenges as well in terms of scaling. Of course, you know, a lot of these scaling challenges that we face are being addressed by variety of different fields, right? You know, memory management, for example has been a very, very integral part of, you know where we are moving as an industry. Now, what that brings up at a high level is the diversity of talent that we need, right? In the memory technology space, you know we are an integrated device manufacturer, right? I've been with Micron for more than 25 years now and I can tell you, we have faced competition significantly at various phases in the company's history. Enormous competition in Japan initially, right? When Micron started, you know that was our biggest competition. And then of course, moving on to Korea and moving forward, it will be China for sure. So we face a lot of competition from Asia and really where we are today in terms of technology as I mentioned, you know we are just to some extent I would say, you know benefiting by having, you know exceptional memory management techniques and that kind of brings the diversity in terms of the talent that we need, right? Memory technology historically has focused on yield and will continue to be, you know we are a heavy manufacturing company as well. So we have to focus on cost, high yield, all of that but look at where we are today. We are pretty much, you know in the material space touching almost every element in the periodic table, right? It's incredible how vast we are, you know touching the material science space. In the devices area of course, you know continued scaling poses a lot of challenges as I mentioned, you know vertical structures are not trivial to make, right? And in high volume in manufacturable manner. Now when we look at memory management space again, you know we are bringing enormous disciplines converging into this space. We need talent in, you know areas like signal processing, for example which was traditionally not part of the memory technology industry as a whole, right? So we need experts in various disciplines from, you know covering a wide gamut of, you know spectrum from material science to devices to circuits and innovative techniques of memory management, software and firmware and algorithms. So we are touching every area and our competition again, as I said you know is largely outside the U.S. And so that's kind of where we are today in terms of the state of where we are in the industry. The last thing I wanted to kind of mention briefly is you know probably will be a good discussion in the panel today is we have in the memory industry touched upon variety of different, you know emerging memory technologies in the past, right? You know, we have seen if you open any, you know technical journal you would see a huge chunk of, you know memory technologies that are being advertised as the next holy grail in terms of scaling and replacing, you know that the traditional DRAM and that. Now where are we there, right? So a lot of these memory segments have gone into lower densities, you know embedded space, for example those are the proving grounds if you will, right? But they've never really made sure to get to a point of, you know high volume, commodity type space. Now I say commodity in a very loose sense, you know certainly memory is there everywhere, right? You know, Bill mentioned about various areas of cloud and, you know computing space and graphics and automotive. I mean, it's a very, very wide segment that we try to cover, right? Memory is there everywhere at various levels, various densities. It's also true that the, you know operating systems that these devices use in IoT systems, for example are different, right? The specs are gonna be different as well. So in terms of the emerging memory area if you look at it, right? Really DRAM as we know it is really where it is today because of the strength of the simplicity in the technology and the ability for us to, you know continue pushing scaling and continue pushing our products through good memory management as well. That's gonna continue. It's not gonna drop off. Having said that, you know at some point we're gonna be looking at, you know replacement of these technologies or I would say more displacement of these technologies. So we cannot ignore the emerging memory space. What that puts us is the heavy burden of R&D that we have to invest, right? It's a huge investment that we need to make. There are not many companies that are gonna be doing that. And again, in the western world entire western world, Micron is the only company doing a lot of this work. We have fantastic facilities in our R&D centers in Boise and various other manufacturing locations. And the cost of doing this R&D cost of doing, you know, down selection for example in the path finding space is enormous for us. So we face a lot of challenges as a company we face challenge from a country, not a company, right? Korea is really managing this as a national initiative. And that's definitely gonna be a challenge. And increasingly we're gonna see that from China. There's a lot of investments in China as well. So we're gonna face that challenge. And we can only win this by really being very, very smart in how we invest, very, very smart in how we do R&D. That's the only way to our success. And we are well positioned really, I would say to really do that but we can get all the help we can from the universities, from talent pool that we create from various spectrum, as I mentioned. We need at the very end of the spectrum a really high talent pool that we need to absorb in the company to go forward in our technologies. We also need technicians and operators who are trained in day-to-day operations of manufacturing as well as yield improvement and other areas of data science and AI which is really coming into place to develop our technology. So we need wide spectrum of talent pool. And we are really going to be dependent on a lot of that coming from the US. So our supply chain, as someone mentioned earlier is really going to be the weak link is going to be the problem for us, right? There are certain weak links and certainly talent pool is one of the weak links that we are concerned about. So with that, I'll stop and hand it over to Bill for additional thoughts from others. Thanks, Ishaundra. So we're gonna move on to Mark, paper master and Mark, formerly at Apple and helping pivot towards some of the verticalization you see within industry, but now at AMD. Growing rapidly there. So Mark, tell us a little bit about what you're seeing. Thanks, Bill. And thanks to you and Purdue University and Mark for inviting me onto the panel. Look forward to the discussion today. Well, I'll tell you, I'll start with the topic that Ron in terms of semiconductor technology, the supply chain and where that has influence on our country going forward and some of the key factors. And I have to now date myself. You mentioned that. So I'm a 40 year veteran coming on next year in the industry. I met my wife, who's a product of the STEM education back at that time, electrical and computer engineer like myself. And it was the heyday of semiconductors. I mean, we joined the field when it was expanding. The technologies were changing from bipolar transistors to the CMOS approaches that now have lasted decades, although on modifications. And it was just such an exciting area to be in. And who would have thought almost 40 years later that there's a rebirth in our industry? Yet we face challenges that we have to take on. We have to take on innovation because Moore's law is slowing. So that traditional benefit we used to get from each new semiconductor node naturally propelling us forward with just great gains of energy efficiency and higher performance, yet at the same cost range per transistor, those days are gone. You still have a high dependency on new semiconductor nodes, but we don't get that same degree of gain and the cost per transistor has been going up now several generations. And you look at that and it drives a need for more innovative approaches. And again, innovation is the king of our industry. Being around a while, I can tell you, I've already been through several, I'll say near-death experiences for our industry. What do I mean by that? I mean, I remember where we hit the micron limit with semiconductor lithography where we thought we couldn't even get below that type of miniaturization on our chip designs. And of course, every time we hit any one of those barriers, innovation went out at the end of the day. And we're very focused on that at AMD. It's about, in fact, Deirdre mentioned it earlier, what are we doing to progress high-performance computing? Of course, we invest in partnering on semiconductor technology, but we think about differently how we put the solutions together. And of course, it's CPU, that general-purpose processor, but pairing it with accelerators like GPUs and other focused accelerators, packaging it in different ways. We were an early adopter in the industry, one of the first adopters of a chiplet approach so that you can mix and match different technologies as well as different types of computing elements together in a more facile way. And so these are the kind of innovations that will continue. And so it's just amazing to me that an industry that I thought by the time I reached this point in my career might be getting a little stale is just at a peak of excitement. The reason is, is the society needs us because you see those embedded devices all around us. We've got in the factory floor, it's all smart devices, we've got telemetry, we're optimizing our manufacturing flows. We have it at work, we're collecting data and putting that data to work with advanced analytics and AI. AI is a huge consumer of high-performance computing to both manage those big data sets and train them and put them to work and then inferencing where on the fly you're using it for analytics. And then of course our home lives. Think about the kind of computing we all want. We want realistic life visuals as we see one another. Soon we'll be all avatars in the metaverse as we're in this type of meeting. So there's an explosion of data. There's a whole different set of demands that we have of how we wanna put that data to workforce and then how we use computing to interface on a daily basis. So wow, what a great time. But there's an existential threat that we all face in industry and that is we can't continue that pace of innovation without both a growth in the skill pool and appropriate collaboration, collaboration that drives innovation. So let's take just a minute and talk about the skill pool. Well, I'll tell you just at AMD in the US alone. So we're a big company, we're a global company. We've been growing leaps and bounds. We hired over 600 engineers out of our 4,000 sum in the US alone. Again, I'm talking only US. We hired over 600 in 2021. We're projecting to hire over 600 in 2022. And what we're finding is it's extremely difficult to find the skills that we need. And chip design, like Chandra was talking about, advanced techniques and signaling skills out of Deirdre's side that are very adept in leveraging the electronic design automation tools so that we can verify these designs so that we can and facile ways put them together. So skills it turns out is fundamental for us to be able to keep this momentum and satisfy this explosive demand for high performance computing. And really it's gonna take and concerted effort by all of us. We're gonna have to start at K through 12. If we want to take this excitement that we all see in front of us and translate it down to getting more enrollment in our engineering curricula then we have to convey that excitement of our technology field of semiconductors and putting together semiconductor based solutions. And by the way, putting together semiconductor solutions is both hardware and software skills. It takes to do that. So it's multidisciplinary. And I will say, I chose electrical and computer engineering decades ago because it was a degree that could apply to solving a vast set of problems that couldn't be more true today. So any of the branches of engineering or programming is such an exciting area. One that students can apply themselves in such challenging problems that will be in front of them the entire lifetime. So we have to band together and get that story out to K to 12. But we have to do more than that. We need to partner on university programs. This is so the academia industry partnership is critical to share the kind of problems that we see. We're often at the cutting edge of what consumers, whether in their commercial or their personalized, what the consumers need for computing. So we need to share that, get that problem set in front of academia and as well, partnership with government. I can't say enough about how important that is in the U.S. I'll use an example of what we did at AMD in terms of collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy. Fundamental for the turnaround that Bill mentioned at AMD. 10 years ago is when I stepped in in this role at the CTO at AMD and the team here had already started working just then with the Department of Energy and we put a bet in for what was the start of what became the exascale program. It was the fast forward and we were given a grant to work on high performance computing approaches. And we proposed heterogeneous computing how CPU and GPUs could work together very, very efficiently to advance high performance computing. And we got several other grants and then ultimately a one to bid to supply the CPU and GPU for what will be the, we expect to be the largest supercomputers stood up in Oak Ridge National Lab in Knoxville, Tennessee. This fall it's being stood up right now and being brought up in production with our partners and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oak Ridge National Lab. So we all need to partner together to create the right skill pool from K to 12 to college programs to retraining to really thinking about immigration and our policies there. We need to focus on collaboration how we're working together across industry with universities, with government. If we do that, if we can get our arms around how we work together and how we build the skill pool then I see an incredibly bright future for how we will drive innovation forward in the US and the world to continue to suffice that exploding demand of computation in society. Thanks and with that Bill, back to you. Great, yeah, great comments Mark. I'm gonna go next to Thomas, so the president and CEO of SkyWater Technology to represent his portion of the sector and then we'll finish with Sri. Thanks Bill. It's a pleasure to join Purdue Department of Commerce and all my colleagues from industry and academia. It's always exciting to hear people like Mark and others talk about what they're seeing. I'm sure many of you on the call are wondering who SkyWater is. SkyWater is a US based and solely US investor owned DMEA accredited peer play foundry. We specialize in advanced innovation, engineering services and volume manufacturing across a wide variety of integrated circuits. Ironically, I began my career at AMD 30 plus years ago as part of the team that created global foundries. And one of the things that is exciting about SkyWater is that we also spun out of another company, Cypher Semiconductor and are really bringing a lot of unique ideas and capabilities to the aerospace and defense, automotive, computation, consumer, industrial and med device markets. One of the things that we're very proud of at SkyWater is we pioneer what we call our technology foundry model. SkyWater is a trusted innovation partner and in many ways the trusted innovation partner for many of the specialized computational capabilities that are being brought to market. We leverage our heritage of a CMOS platform that has been running for many years at our fab in Minnesota. And that capability is allowing us to bring new emerging technologies like superconducting, photonics and carbon nanotube derived 3D SOCs to market. We have again a decade, decades of heritage with innovation services. And our whole goal is really to help customers efficiently develop and scale their next generation products. Again, here domestically within the United States. So while all of us recognize the unique moment we find ourselves in with the heightened awareness of the criticality of our industry and the importance of the bipartisan support we're getting from the government to regain America's prominent status as a leading semiconductor manufacturer. I believe you could all say in part that SkyWater is a product of this national reawakening. Back in 2017 when we were spun out of Cyprus, a lot of what we were doing seemed somewhat absurd trying to bring a foundry capability back to United States. That said, under the last administration, industry veterans like Purdue's Dean Chung who we heard from earlier who was serving in the State Department, Ian Stuff, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce and others were all amplifying these messages that our industry and the US government must begin to emphasize the need for America companies, American companies to really step up their domestic semiconductor manufacturing efforts. So the growing momentum that this created really helped establish SkyWater as an effective domestic boundary and solution provider to both commercial and government partners. This momentum has also led to a growing course in Congress, championed by senators like Todd Young from Indiana, Chuck Schumer of course, who's been pushing this heavily for New York and others to really create the funding infusion that America is gonna require if we're gonna regain our footing in this space. Important to remember that semiconductors were created in America. This is a legacy that we own. We still have a lot of capabilities here that we can leverage, but we cannot lose side of the importance of manufacturing. Great countries manufacture things and we need to be a manufacturer of semiconductors. Since January, the leadership, under the leadership of President Biden, Secretary Armando, we've gotten to the point where passage of the CHIPS Act and UCCA seems very likely. I think it's a privilege to be able to join this panel with Sri representing the Department of Commerce, who's worked diligently with Skywater and other industry partners to fully understand the challenges we face in the business environment and with workforce development. In the end, our ability to bring back semiconductor manufacturing to the US will be completely dependent on not only investment, but creating a workforce that can enable the scale that we envision. From a Skywater perspective, with a growing wafer fab here in the Midwest and an advanced packaging facility in Florida, the state of the US semiconductor industry, in many ways can be characterized as challenged, outgunned by foreign interest, and their strong incentive programs and in dire need of a two prong strategy. The first is how do we grow domestic innovation and capacity fulfillment in the near term? And the second is how do we disrupt the lead the Far East has on this industry and retake this leadership role here in the United States? And the next, you know, six to 18 months, fab just won't come online quick enough to address a lot of the domestic supply chain shortages we're seeing. There are some unique, albeit expensive, repurposing of clean room spaces that can be combined with tool purchases to increase capacity that will help alleviate the shortage in the short term. But in the longterm, it's not just about adding capacity, which gets a lot of attention, frankly, in the press. The most important thing we need to do is promote innovation to rapidly realize the potential of disruptive new technologies like advanced packaging, like superconducting and carbon nanotube derived computational platforms that will allow us to leapfrog the state of the art while in parallel creating an end to end domestic value chain. We don't just wanna make wafers in the U.S. We need to, you know, do the complete value chain, final assembly and test, everything needs to be contained here within our country. Second, and very importantly, we need to see the workforce of the future with educational programs and curricula like Produce New, Microcronics program that Dean Chung talked about that will lead to the creation of a ready-to-work talent pool that will populate the new R&D centers and FABS that our country intends to fund and allow us to create a world-class American high-tech manufacturing capability for decades to come. So I look forward to the discussion on the panel and hope we all leave re-energized about what we can accomplish together. We need a willingness to advocate for the passage of the critical legislation that will transform our industry and double down on our support for educational institutions like Purdue, Notre Dame, and others who are promoting the fields of studies that will enable an American high-tech manufacturing revival. That's it, thank you, Bill. Yeah, that's great. All right, last but not least, you know, the ups and a lot of these discussions of where it's collapsing into the government is three, so three, no pressure. But tell us about where you're seeing it from your government stands right now. Thank you, Bill. Yeah, no pressure. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to join and I'm really looking forward to the discussion. I agree with Tom. I mean, this is obviously a unique moment in time. I mean, we're seriously contemplating 52 billion in financial assistance for this industry. And folks on Capitol Hill, folks in the administration, in industry, in academia and national security, everybody is rowing in the same direction to get this done. That is really quite amazing. From where I stand, I think we're at a crossroads. I think there are two paths forward and to be perfectly honest with this group, it is not entirely clear to me which path we are going to take. That is the one path where we collectively seize this moment. We focus on systemic transformation. We focus on changing the underlying economics. We create new collaborations. We deal with the structural barriers. And so we end up with long-term investments in R&D manufacturing instead of short-term subsidies. We end up with open technology and R&D roadmaps instead of walled gardens. We end up with massive productivity gains instead of massive cost escalations. We end up with workforce programs that huge scale and coordination instead of individual fragmented initiatives. And we end up with a secure supply chain that promotes confidentiality and integrity instead of a single-sourced foreign choke point that promotes none of that. That's one path. There is another path where we collectively decide that getting the 52 billion and getting to this point was in fact the big lift. And that from here on, it is about figuring out individual programs to spend the money as fast as we can. We disperse it as widely as we can. We focus on essentially minimizing the risk of getting things wrong. And that has its own advantages. It will help make a thousand flowers bloom. But whether that brings new approaches, do we end up mostly doing the same thing that we've done in the past, but with more money? Whether that's on workforce or R&D or anything else that remains to be seen. Whether it brings that lasting transformation or do we end up losing the forest for the trees? I think that remains to be seen. So I think that's the challenge. And that's certainly the challenge that I've been posing in my conversations with industry, with academia, with my own colleagues in government. Which way do we go? What is the... If we go with that first path, then what is that new thinking? What is that new industry structure that we are trying to get that supports both the large firms and the small firms and the established firms and the new ones? What are those platforms that will support the collaborations that Mark was talking about? Are there gonna be new partnerships? Are there gonna be new consortia? Whether that's across company boundaries or across state boundaries? Are we gonna see new things emerging? Is there gonna be coordination on the security and confidentiality as Dito was suggesting? Or on energy efficiency or on heterogeneous integration, right? Are we going to see new structures and new initiatives? Will there be scale and stickiness? Or will it be what we've seen in the last few years except with more money thrown at it? I think that's where we are. That's yet to be determined. And how we choose one path over the other is the focus of the discussion. Thanks, Sri. All right. So what I heard a couple of different things but one of the things is the need for innovation. Yeah, I would characterize the electronics industry as incredibly nerdy. And I say that as one of those nerds that has been driving the world. We literally have lifted the world on our shoulders. And we've done it all the while. While you're talking about the doom and gloom at the end of our industry and end of Moore's Law, like literally end of Moore's Law is like five years away for the last 30 years or more, right? All the while, like we have transformed the entire globe to use the products that are the basis of Moore's Law. So here we are again, right? It is actually a moment of inflection. We're seeing the strains of the advanced CMOS and scaling challenges. And it's not like something that stops at all. I think it's actually something that then just fosters and encroves on innovation. So instead of doom and gloom, like how do you pivot this so that innovation is actually the fun part, right? And I would actually characterize Moore's Law as incredibly boring, right? So like here you go. It's been the epicenter and the center of society yet it's a roadmap, right? And as a researcher, it's like, okay, roadmaps are good, but what I really want to do is like invent novel things and into the future. And I think this is the opportunity we have. And so it is exciting. So what I want to do is go through the panel and talk about where you see innovation in the next five to 10 years in your particular area. I'm gonna start with Deidre. I'll ask the panel to be fairly concise here. And then we'll start a conversation around your answers. So in EDA in five to 10 years, if this is the moment where innovation is gonna spark this revolution, what is it in EDA that's gonna make that happen? Yeah, I think in my opening remarks, I think I touched on some of the big discontinuities that we need to address. So briefly on things like 3DIC and heterogeneous integration, we've got to really start to think about reliability, testability, the thermal envelope for these devices. In order to do a lot of that, you need to understand the actual workloads that are gonna be driven on these. So the EDA industry is created with a whole host of magnificent point tools that need to be leveraged in a broad-based systemic way. And so we need our engineers to be able to drive those tools as I think we heard Mark comment on earlier, but I think we need to start to think about, yes, bigger chips, more complex chips, but also systems of chips truly. So that's kind of number one. Number two, when I look at this notion of security, it reminds me of when we were trying to design for low power a decade ago as devices were becoming more mobile. And I remember being in an exec dinner in Taiwan and people were bombarding me, like I need to design for low power, how the heck do I do it? And then gradually the tooling came online and the knowledge came online. And I think in design for security, we're going to need to bring up that level of capability. And that's gonna be a big challenge because security is not a closed form problem. It's a very open form problem. And there's the threat landscape is constantly evolving. If you think about things like post quantum cryptography, we're gonna have a big issue in protecting the banking that we do on our devices over the next decade, we need to solve these types of problems. So I think the EDA and IP industry need to be constantly doing our job, which is to understand all the innovation that's occurring out there and making sure that we are comprehending that in our solution so that people can, as I've talked to three about before, fill those gaps with amazing designs. And the last one I would say is in universities, I think a lot of electrical engineering departments are saying that CS is eating the world, CS is taking over on a lot of degree programs over electrical engineering. So we need to stem that tide, but in the industry is AI taking over the world. And I think an EDA, AI is a booster. AI is not a, isn't gonna take out all the engineers out there, but I think that's another discussion hopefully we get into. Back to you, Bill. That's great, Dieter. So Chandra, in memory, you mentioned a couple of vectors you think are interesting. You had to pick one in that five year timeframe. Like what is it that you're excited about that's gonna spark a revolution in technology? Yeah, so Bill, when I look at memory today, I will give an example that everybody's aware of, right? When planar NAND technology was reaching pretty much its limits, right? You could argue whether it is a physical limit or is it something else? But basically we could not really have multiple cells with planar NAND with incredibly small volume of silicon. So we had to come up with a solution, right? So the industry really rided around and came up with the 3D NAND solution. And so we went vertical, right? So that's gonna continue. And the trend is continuing and you can see the revolution cost because of that, right? We are all taking for granted the incredible amount of densities that we have in storage class memory. But it's all possible because of two things, right? Vertical scaling as well as, you know, ability for us to do multi-level cells. Now, the biggest challenge I see in the next coming years is gonna be what's gonna happen in DRAM, right? So in DRAM we are in a very, very critical inflection point. Again, you know, historically when you look at it and you say, oh, you know, we have talked about endoscaling in DRAM for decades, right? But jokes apart, right? We continue to push this. And, you know, through many, many ways that I mentioned briefly earlier, but we are really getting to a point where as an industry as a whole, you know, we are facing challenges with scaling and we need to come up with innovative solutions. Now, many people have come to me and said, hey, you know, Micron, you guys have a wrong name for the company, right? You know, Micron, what does it mean, right? Now I say, no, we have the right name. You know, our dye size is few Microns now, right? We are not talking about individual transistors anymore. We are talking about, you know, entire dye becoming, you know, so small. So innovation is gonna be very, very critical. And I think in that area as well, right? My input to this panel would be to say, we need, you know, ability to do incredibly rapid prototyping, right? Very quickly determine if this is a wrong path to go. We need to know that soon, right? We cannot be spending years on end in a path and then say, hmm, this is not gonna work. So how can we do that effectively? Now, can we do this alone? In my opinion, we cannot, we have traditionally been very, it's a very competitive industry, right? Everybody, we all in our own space face a lot of competition. So we have to be careful to protect our IP, protect our, you know, technologies, all of that. But we cannot be in this continuous mode of wall garden where we say, well, we'll try to do everything ourselves. The reason I say that is, you know, Micron is a unique company in the memory space, particularly I would say, because we don't compete with our customers, right? We have partnership with a lot of our customers. And when we look at, you know, product enablement, whether it is chiplets, whether it is package level innovations, system level integration, right? You know, system level co-optimizations are becoming extremely critical. And we can't do this alone, right? We have to have the right partnerships and we need to do this quickly. So two things I would say, rapid prototyping, identifying fails quickly, and then moving on to, you know, more promising areas is going to be critical. So we need, you know, infrastructure that allows us to do that. And then partnerships with companies that can collaborate with us instead of being in this complete silo is not going to work going forward, I feel. So I think that's going to be very critical as well. Thanks, Chandra. That's great. Mark, CPU design, packaging, sort of your world, you know, you're going through something right now, which I think is pretty exciting in terms of chiplet integration and what not, as you mentioned, project a little bit further out five to 10 years. Do you see an evolution of that that drives it? Or where do you see innovation really, flipping the script on how you're doing things today? You're on mute, Mark. There we go. Yeah, it's not by any means a temporary phenomena that we're seeing right now in terms of this move to a chiplet and modular-based approach. I mean, it is a fundamental in terms of how we're going to keep performance scaling, you know, given some of the device phenomena that I described earlier. So it's here to stay. It is both, you know, horizontal connectivity. It's vertical connectivity. We just announced our 3DV cache where we stack SRAM directly over our CPUs with what's called hybrid bonding. So that was a major innovation that we worked on, you know, with the packaging industry such that you have, you know, really silicon-to-silicon connectivity. And so here we are stacking up vertically. And by the way, adding memory closer, cache memory closer to a processor is a fundamental way to try more performance. And so, you know, again, there was an example of technology innovation and collaboration and we're doing the same thing laterally. And it is working with the foundries, working with the global packaging community to be able to laterally stitch together these modular chiplets. So one of the blogs in Hyperscale, Google had an article by me in there who said that the package is the new motherboard. And motherboards, of course, are the, you know, the big boards you see all the discrete electronics packaged on today. And that's collapsing into the package. So innovation will continue on our CPUs, our graphics processors, specialized accelerators. We're gonna innovate on how we put these together horizontally and vertically. And again, it's gotta be collaboration, Sri mentioned a choke point. We can't have a choke point. It is gonna be geographically diverse as to how these solutions are put together, but diversity needs to include the US. So we need, you know, US components of how this is built, but it will remain international and the collaboration will remain such that we need standards bodies that can agree. We're working now with several of our partners and competitors in the industry so that we standardized on how these modular chiplets can talk together. Just like years ago, we standardized at those big motherboards of how, you know, the discrete components would talk with one another. So a lot of innovation yet to go. It is gonna continue on this approach you've seen with both horizontal and vertical advanced integration. And I wanna underscore the points Dierge made. We need a lot of analytics and capability and facility and AI. AI is by no means that replaces the smarts or the engineers we need putting these solutions together. The complexity has grown such that we have just so many, you know, billions and billions of transistors that without AI to facilitate how we put these solutions together, it becomes an intractable problem. So lots of innovation yet to go Bill. And again, it's gonna take many facets coming together to keep us on pace. That's great. All right, so Thomas, you mentioned some already as a, I would say, very flexible foundry. We've been able to tap into you to be able to do some pathfinding but also then some scale manufacturing. So if you just pick one that you're most excited about, tell us which one year that would be. Yeah, great question, Bill. This is one near and dear to your heart. The program we're doing with MIT and Stanford for carbon nanotube based 3DSOC with embedded reram is a perfect example of fresh thinking bringing a disruptive new paradigm to potentially reset Moore's law in a way that could not only create renewed leadership here in the US, but provide a lot of new capability from this functionality. So just at a very high level, what we're essentially doing is taking a 90 nanometer process flow and also a 130 nanometer process but we're working on both. And at the back end of the line, we're adding carbon nanotube field effect transistors that then get coupled with resistive RAM to provide additional computational power to that core CMOS capability. Data to date is showing sub 10 nanometer type performance for edge-based AI processors. Again, leveraging a 90 nanometer platform. So it's somewhat analogous to how our country used fracking technology to regain a certain degree of energy independence by taking a disruptive technology. This is actually through a DARPA funded initiative like carbon nanotubes, adding them to a legacy or mature node technology. We can deliver a leading edge performance at a fraction of the cost. The designs to bring a capability like this to market again are a fraction of the costs that a company like say AMD would have to pay to leverage a five nanometer design. And it also enables AI at the edge, which is very important not only for military applications but for commercial applications as well. So a perfect example, and as was pointed out earlier we need to speed the time from prototyping to bringing solutions to market. I call it ideation to commercialization and five years or less. I think that is the opportunity we have as a country and if we invest our dollars wisely but also just don't try to keep going down the same old paths. I think that's how we'll regain the leadership that we need to have here in our country. I was hoping you'd say that since I got this sent to me in the mail recently. This is your, this is the carbon nanotube eight inch wafer. So it's really fun to go from that conceptual idea a couple of years ago to actually like seeing this manufactured, I haven't tested each of the chips. I can't tell you about yield but it was fun to hang on my wall. So great stuff there. Three, so about innovation, what I want to ask you is actually where are you seeing innovation in funding models, right? So if you look at the government and how they're viewing this, like we've had a pretty traditional way in which you fund universities, universities do early development cycles that you've got certainly private public partnerships and consortium that we've funded. You've got Incutel, you've got some sort of unique ways that the government's looking at doing venture type funding. How are you, where are you seeing innovation? And how do you see this relationship between the government and the industry moving forward? I think certainly from a commerce standpoint, you know, as we've been talking to the industry about this innovation pipeline and trying to understand where the gaps are, there are at least I think three gaps that seem to have emerged in the discussion. And I'm sure there's more, but there's one gap I think around this, this idea of having this rapid prototyping, it's kind of shared facility for mid to late stage prototyping, you know, I'm gonna multivay for a low volume high mix runs, that sort of stuff. Where I think there's this kind of, how do you create that infrastructure and how do you make sure there's open access for everybody to participate in that infrastructure to make their ideas. I think that's one gap that seems to be emerging. There's another gap I think on, I think this idea of, you know, there are, as you're saying, there's multiple US government programs that support R&D in microelectronics, you know, whether it's in the NSF, DOE, DARPA, you know, DOD's got this microelectronics commons that they're thinking about through the chips installation. How do you pull all those initiatives together into a pipeline, right? How do you kind of have this handoff as these projects mature from one TRL to another? So I think that's the second gap that we're kind of seeing and that's one that people have been looking at, you know, is there a way for us to be able to create some kind of a demand signal, almost a pre-commercial demand signal kind of thing. Let's do a net assessment of these projects coming in and let's figure out which ones look to be promising that need, you know, whether that's late stage acceleration or some kind of growth capital or whatever else, right? Can we figure out how to get that going? That's the second gap. And then I think the third gap is this broader, if you look forward over the next 10 years or so, when you say, okay, what are the system requirements? What are we trying to achieve in terms of the outcomes, whether it's energy efficiency or whatever else? What's the infrastructure gaps? Whether that's in tooling or, you know, new architectures or anything, that's all right, where are we seeing gaps that need to be invested in? And I think that's the third piece where, you know, going back to this question of having a more open roadmap, there's kind of time to understand, okay, what are the different elements of the infrastructure that are seem to be missing that we should be investing in? Which may then inform some of the early stage, you know, as government programs. I think those are the least three that we've been, that are on our radar. And then it's kind of how we think about this innovation pipeline and how we support it. What about skill gap? Are you hearing from, you know, a broad community about skill gap? Yeah, so I think we're seeing, so we're seeing skill gaps across a number of places. So I think, you know, and certainly this gets back to not just the R&D and innovation piece, but even on the manufacturing side. I mean, honestly, just basic, just, you know, getting clean room architects, getting, you know, high purity welder, that sort of stuff is already a gap. And then we're seeing, you know, there's gonna be gaps as we start to make these big investments, if these fabs start to come up, you know, getting folks who know how to do the tool installations, you know, that's gonna be a challenge. And then of course, once you get to the actual operations, you know, making sure, you know, folks who know how to maximize yield, folks who know how to cut over. For all of that stuff, I think we're seeing, we're expecting gaps there too, right? So there's a range of these gaps. And I think, you know, one of the challenges that we have to think through is obviously there are individual states and universities doing some great work. But in terms of building a pipeline, do we need a more coordinated approach, right? So that you can actually sustain a strong demand signal to get folks to actually join up in these pipelines or is it enough to just have every state doing its own thing? I think that's kind of an open question out there. Yeah, I mean, I think that leads into kind of this next section I wanted to get into, which is government investment and accelerating this agenda. So when I was in the government, we had a fundamental calculus and it was really from the view of the DOD. And so it's different than I think the commerce view, but it was, you know, the scale of things actually got it out of the reach of control slash even ability to participate for some of the DOD entities, the size of the design teams, the scale of the manufacturing. We definitely couldn't own manufacturing but we had trouble doing designs at scale as well. And so the agenda that we set in ERI was all about lowering the barrier to where innovation could come from. Chips was about, you know, hoping to spur a chiplet revolution so you could actually add unique flavors without having to redesign the whole system. We did an AI for EDA to reduce the number of humans involved in that loop. And then we looked at how to innovate in the eight inch wafer space, things like the carbon nanotubes with sky water. So if we look at that, first off is that central tenant, something people believe in, right? This is a world that bigger has been better, right? It was actually at the time not intuitive to look at how do you, you know, fight the natural trend of scale and look for where you're gonna innovate, right? In a world to that favored scale. So anyone wanna step in and have a comment on whether, you know, that is a belief that has actually held with an industry or tell me how we did. All right, I could just briefly start off, Bill. No, I really applaud what ERI and DARPA MTO sponsorship of ERI has done is really put more broadly on the industry, you know, some of the innovative approach needed to keep scaling performance going forward. And I think you're seeing, you know, AMD, we took an early lead there, but we're seeing really across the industry that approach being adopted. And I just wanna underscore a comment I made earlier. That's what's gonna drive standards. I mean, ERI has actually started some of that dialogue on standards, but it's gonna take even stronger participation of industry. And industry is very good at this. When the need rises for a standardization gets to a point, we do all come together, you know, as trying to do as an area in memory. In memory as well, say one of the earliest leaders are getting super strong participation on standards. And so we do need that and I'm starting to see that emerge now. But a short answer, yes, it's absolutely taking hold in the industry. Yeah, and this is Tom, I'll just add a couple of comments. I think, you know, what Mark said really resonates and, you know, it kind of goes back to, you know, AMD is a great example of a company that thrives through collaboration and that then leads to more innovation. I think that's what we're doing at Skywater, you know, collaborating with MIT, Samford, others in the industry. And by using this moment in time, you know, with the chips bill, et cetera, to create a renewal and innovation. And your comment about linking university academia coming up with a national semiconductor road map or micro electronics road map, that then links the efforts that we have. And we have collectively a lot of great efforts going on in this country. But they're not always pointed in the same direction. And so if we can link what we do at the innovation level, create a rapid prototyping capability, that's frankly one of the reasons Skywater exists, and then turn that into scaled manufacturing, not only for wafer fabrication, but in the end value chain. We already have a strong equipment industry, we have a strong EDA capability here in our country. And obviously a lot of the designs that populate the world come from this country. It's really a question to connect the dots and driving things through collaboration at the innovation level. So that innovation again, leads to in-state solutions, many of which can be made here in the U.S. I'd love to comment, Bill. So first of all, we absolutely have to lower the barriers to design. And you know, in semiconductor, there's a lot of consolidation that occurs. And for a very good reason, because these high-end designs are quite complex and require scale, but we have to enable all the innovators in this country. I imagine like a maker movement for chip design. I mean, how do we get to that, I think is really important. But I need to acknowledge what Bill did. Bill spent a lot of time in the early rounds of ERI, knocking on the door of commercial companies and saying, you need to kind of get involved in this initiative. And I know at least it's synopsis where like, go away, government programs are complicated, they're messy, leave us alone. And his persistence drew us in. And I would say by engaging with government, we've always in our industry been working with system companies and foundries. That's the nature of our business. But what we learned in engaging in these government programs is you have to bring a team. You bring university partners, you bring other industry partners, and you collaborate to fix a problem, to address a problem that's bigger than any one company can do. And I'm excited about the potential in chips because I've heard from our colleagues in commerce, they want teams to show up. They want systemic solutions to things. They want things to be not just a, spending government money, God forbid, but truly trying to advance the ball and drive innovation. So if we can accomplish that and reduce the barriers to design, I think we can unleash a whole bunch of innovation. Not easy to do, but I think it's an imperative for all of us on this call and in the industry. Yeah, I think Bill, this point about reducing the minimum efficiency of scale, right? Kind of change, that's a good example of that first part that I got outlined of like a systemic transformation. So we're not playing the same game of, who's got more subsidies to piss at the industry to be part of my language. Where there is a different structure that emerges, I think would be, that's a good example. But I don't know, technically, I don't know if there are promising things out there. And that's part of this, I think this innovation pipeline gap that we've kind of identified as we actually don't, we don't have a ready-made list of those things that have gone through a certain amount of proof of concept and are looking to be promising ideas that you can immediately point to. And say, yeah, I want to invest some money here on prototyping some of these things, right? I think that's part of the gap that we need to try to close. I think one of the things that now as a electrical engineer swimming around lots of software engineers and products, right? There is a little bit of a difference in culture and when the software world faces some of these challenges they find the common underpinnings, create open source technologies and then differentiate on top of a common base. It is a, that's a little bit unique from a hardware perspective. I know there's some movements ongoing, but in terms of collaboration, like what, I go to Mark and Chandra as large companies, how do you view how to view both open source but then beyond open source, just consortiums and collaboration in a world where IP is so important? Let me make a quick comment, Bill on the innovation front, right? I mean, one of the things that we really have to look at is the speed of innovation, right? How quickly we can get to critical answers that we need to see in any of these topics, right? There was comments about standards. That's very critical and it takes time, right? When you have to form a consensus with a diverse set of people in the industry, it takes time but when we make progress, right? Progress, we have, historically we have seen in every area that we can imagine. I mean, the speed at which we have to do things and really fail fast, right? Really fail fast because, as Sri mentioned, right? When we have to collectively get together and say, okay, what are the most promising things that we have in the horizon, right? In all these different areas that we talk about, whether it is innovative designs, whether it is innovative material systems and new concept devices, how can we collectively laid all out and say what is the most promising thing that we can focus on? Now, historically, we have been in a very competitive world, right? I mean, we try to keep those things very close to heart, right? So we would say, well, in a panel like this, can we openly talk about what are the most promising memory technologies? Well, I would not be at a liberty to tell that, right? But can we get to a point where we discuss this at a high level at least, right? I'll post a few things here. I wanna distract the team too much into technical discussions here, but 2D materials are there, right? You know, in the 2D material space, what are the barriers right now to enter into it in a big manner, right? What is preventing us from getting there? Now, if we go list this down in a very pre-competitive manner, I absolutely think there are topics that will emerge out that we can collectively come up to solutions, come up with solutions. Now, that is very needed. Now, I give this example because you look at publications coming out of Korea today, okay? Just as an example, and even China, you see that happening, right? Among industries collaborating with universities, joining together in a pre-competitive manner and coming up with these shortlist and prioritization. That is very, very needed, very much needed because we are going to have, you know, we talk about $55 billion, but that's nothing compared to what we need to do, right? So our funds are going to deplete very, very quickly. Now, if you're not smart about how we spend this and how we get at these, you know, big problems quickly, we will face challenge. The other difficulty that I want to very briefly mention is every material that we talk about, right? I think Tom mentioned about carbon nanotubes. There will be opportunities to find niche areas, okay? Now, will that niche area stay as a niche area or is it going to explode, right? You know, if you go back in history and you look at a germanium-based transistor that was first conceived, well, it was probably for a niche area for building, hearing aids, right? Now it exploded on us, right? And where we are today is history. Now, what are those gems that we have that we have the potential to explode on us? This is not clear, right? In the memory area, I can talk a lot about this, but this is going to be very critical for us going forward, I feel. Mark, can you address the, you know, the collaboration aspect of how we move forward? There's a word I use and maybe I overuse it, but there's for reasons, ecosystem. To me, ecosystem is everything in our industry. That's how we solve big problems. In the end of the day, why is it, do I always say open source wins or these collaborative effort wins? Is that they bring an ecosystem, they bring us all working together. I mean, it's just fundamental to be able to keep our industry on pace. And so we are committed in AMD to open source. We do open source, our software stack, you know, and it allows a broad set of innovation across a community. It builds a whole community, building solutions. It brings, it's very strong input we have from our government partners and our university partners, that they want that kind of open source solution so that they can collaborate with us, get students working with us on bright ideas. And the same in terms of the solutions that we put together in the industry. I believe you need, you know, this innovation coming from different players coming together. Of course, big companies, you know, can create a very, very strong vertical. I had years at IBM, I had, you know, time at Apple working on iPhone. These are vertical solutions in their heyday at IBM. Certainly mainframes is a vertical solution, for instance, you know, the iPhone iPad is a vertical solution. And those play their part. They drive innovation and they have a point need. But when you want to bring innovation across a broad scale of solutions, of point uses in the industry, you must have an ecosystem. And we're absolutely committed to that. That's great. Okay, so we got a couple of questions. We're not going to be able to get through all of them timing-wise. We had a really robust good discussion here. So unfortunately, I can be able to address all of them. The one that seems to be coming up is, you know, what can academia do? I think everyone's asking, you know, how do they participate and what can they do? So kind of go through the round here and have a discussion on that. Deidre, why don't you start that? Yes, crank out more engineers and crank out more researchers and help draw them to our industry. Keep it simple. Okay, so following up on that, like Thomas, how do we do that? So like, got it. I think we're all on board with making semiconductors cool again, right? Like, and it is cool. And it's actually like the most innovative and interesting time to be in this area. But it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody outside of this panel believes that, right? So how do we do that? Thomas, what do you think? Yeah, again, great question. I think a good example is the scale program, championed by Purdue to get more people that are comfortable, you know, getting clearances to go into the DOD. That's a way to get people excited about semiconductor manufacturing. You know, I personally have made this a mission that I'm on to engage, you know, different institutions, educational institutions about the importance of semiconductors. I was at Notre Dame last Friday presenting to their VLSI fabrication class, talking about the exciting world of semiconductor manufacturing and how critical it is for students to get excited about, you know, making a career in this space. I have a senior who is getting told, a senior in high school is being told, you've got to go into computer science. That's where the action is. And I think part of what we have to do as you just alluded to is make it cool to be in manufacturing, you know, make it exciting. And so, you know, I think university programs like scale, getting a semiconductor program like Purdue is doing, these are, these are transformational opportunities. And frankly, why do people get degrees because they want to get jobs at the end? But as Mark alluded to, there's a certain intensity about semiconductor manufacturing and semiconductors in general that I think is a great place for people, you know, to build a career. And it's not just about designing chips. It's the intricate nature of manufacturing them. And if we have good manufacturing center jobs here in the US, I think we're going to draw a lot of talent into it. But it's going to take really all of us working with academia to make people understand why semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing manufacturing is, you know, an important career endeavor. And what else have a strong point of view that I want to share? Yep, absolutely. I'll just add one thing I gave a lecture to some inner city community college students in LA and cover your ears, Mark, but I showed them a picture of like the Nvidia headquarters and also the Apple Infinite Loop. And I said, you know, these are cool places to work, first of all, from a design standpoint. And then, you know, I showed them the stats. I'm like, you know, you're going to work hard, but you're going to make good money and build a career and a life for yourself. So I think we need to kind of appeal to folks' heart and mind. Absolutely, you know, point of view, I would add, is that we are at an inflection point and how we pull this off and attract people to this area and collaborate together, you know, will indelibly affect our future and the ability for the U.S. to remain such a strong, innovative player. And Shree, again, no pressure, but I think with what you all are leading at the Department of Commerce, I will really bring a spotlight on everything that we've discussed here today. So all of us are highly incented to work with you and Secretary Romando and make this incredibly successful and impactful. So I want to make a point on, you know, how the universities can help here. I think a lot of very good comments on, you know, we need good researchers, we need interdisciplinaryly trained students, right? We cannot have students, you know, just silo focusing on one area. You know, ideally the workforce is going to, you know, come out, coming out of the university pool, going forward should be, you know, fairly diverse in terms of their understanding. But of course, the strength in one area is always helpful, right? But having that vertical scale to understand, you know, variety of different aspects is going to be very, very critical. I mentioned this many times in many forums. I think we see the lack of that in the US universities, unfortunately, but I think we need to encourage more of that. And programs like, you know, Purdue, for example, having interdisciplinary programs is actually a fantastic place, right? And we have benefited a lot, right? We are having excellent students coming out of Purdue particularly. The other extreme that I want to mention is what kind of Shree mentioned, right? We need good welders, right? Think about it this way, right? If you're a welder, you know, working in an automotive plant in a garage, right? What money are you going to be making? And the same welder, if you're strained in doing some high-pressure welding for a high-pressure anneal tool in a manufacturing environment in a semiconductor company, how much money are you going to be making? These are enormously high-paging, paying jobs, right? Now we are losing out on this, right? We do not have people who are trained in unique skills like that. And I will go back to the EDA environment as well, right? You know, traditionally, if I remember, you know, even 20 years ago, people say, oh, you know, if you're a draftsman, you know, you can do some auto-cat type of work, you could probably play around with layout, not anymore, right? What type of skills do they need? Do they need a four-year degree? Probably not, right? They can very well do a two-year degree in a community college, in a very specific area, vocational training, with some good collaboration with industry and really be absorbed in the industry to cater to those needs and make a lot of money, right? So I think top research universities like Purdue have a unique opportunity to locally participate, locally collaborate with community colleges where they can bring some of their expertise and talent, even maybe go teach in places like that, and then give them an opportunity to get a two-year degree, for example, in a very unique area to be absorbed by the industry, particularly when manufacturing flourishes in the US again. So I think that's one point. So there is a diversity of need, so I don't want to underestimate the need at the other end of the spectrum where we focus only on research. Research is important, we need that innovation, all of that, but there's a lot of innovation that needs to be done in, you know, having good data scientists, people able to go use some of the cat tools better and unique skill sets that we need in manufacturing as well. So I just wanna make that point. All right, I think we are nearly out of time. I'll look at Mark. I see he jumped on. I think we are actually three minutes over at this point. So it's been a great discussion. We haven't got to all the questions, but I'm really excited to pull this team together. I think what I learned is like, this is a very special moment in time, decisions we make in the next, you know, even three months, but two a year are going to, you know, have this inflection work or not if the bill doesn't pass, I'm worried if the bill passes and we squander it away, I worry this doesn't jump into a new world of government influence on this that has to spark this level of innovation. So good luck to the panel in terms of getting, helping get this right as we move forward. Mark, any last words from you? No, I just want to thank you once again. Thank you, Bill, for moderating this and thank you, panel one. It was a really interesting discussion. You've given us a lot to think about. I'll remind everyone in the audience that there are two more panels. We'll take an hour break now and then there's a panel we'll start. The next panel we'll start at one o'clock Eastern time and then panel three will be at two o'clock Eastern time. So thank you for getting us off to a great start and giving us a lot to think about. And I agree, we're at an inflection point and if we can convey this excitement and opportunity and the rapid innovation that's needed in microelectronics, that's really going to help us engage the student interest that we need. So thank you all. Great. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you. One, it's one o'clock and we'd like to get started with panel two. So, panel one gave us a lot to think about and mull over and panel two will continue that discussion focusing more on the commercial sector. And we're delighted to have Theresa Mayer. Theresa is vice president for research and partnerships here at Purdue University. She's also an active semiconductor researcher and we've been colleagues in that area for a long time. So Theresa, we'll turn panel two over to you. Thanks Mark. I hope everybody had a great lunch and we are looking forward to another exciting panel discussion. Panel number two is focusing on workforce development challenges as well as proposed solutions for commercial applications. And this panel is bringing together four thought leaders from a number of different sectors to address this very important topic. So I will introduce the panel, a panelist quickly and then begin with a overall framing and then turn the panel over for introductory comments from each of the panelists. So this afternoon, we have joining us, Dr. Willie May who is the vice president for research and economic development at Morgan State University. Dr. Charles Clancy who is the senior vice president and general manager of MITRE Labs. Dr. Shankar Bansali who is a director of the division of electrical communications and cyber systems at the National Science Foundation. And Dr. Todd Yonkin, the president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. And so again, I'd like to just kick panel two off by framing both the challenge and the opportunity just to put everything in context with some real numbers so that we can launch into a productive dialogue this afternoon. I think it's fair to say that across the board, talent in our country is our most important asset. And this panel is focusing on talent. According to Semiconductor Industry we had some 10,000 job openings that couldn't be filled fast enough. When the president of Semi was asked, is there a shortage of people, yes or no? He answered, there is only one answer, yes, and it's big time. Indeed lists over 11,500 job openings in semiconductor manufacturing. Similar searches for semiconductor design, testing, packaging and microelectronics yield 12,000, 5,000, 2,600 and 1,500 openings for a total of over 21,000 openings currently today. This is approximately twice the number of openings as reported last year. And I think as all of us have been following the news over the past year, it's clear that the semiconductor and packaging industry is expected to grow rapidly in the future. Projections are over 17% this year and more than 5% per year through 2025. And depending on the outcome of acts like the CHIP Act, maybe these are underestimates. Given that the workforce is approximately 275% that equates to an increased demand of about 50,000 this year and approximately 15,000 in subsequent years through 2025. So clearly not all demands will be met through existing programs and graduates. And that would include all levels from certifications and credentials, all the way to PhDs. The rapid growth in the semiconductor and packaging areas is outstripping the national talent pool and then if we take that a step further and consider the many majors and people overlap in areas such as cybersecurity and AI, there is even greater pressure on this number one important talent source to supply the future of the semiconductor industry. So with that overall framing, what I'd like to do is turn this over for a brief just opening from each of our panelists starting with Dr. Willie May. And if you could just say a few words also about your current position and background, that would be great. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Willie E. May, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Morgan State University in a future life and my only future life, past life rather. I was the Undersecretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, our NIST. Today, we are living in an age like no other and this Information Age, Silicon based semiconductors have become the foundation of the world's information economy. The Information Age is booming and our ability to handle vast amounts of new information is dependent on the creativity of our scientists and engineers. In order to beat these new information challenges, we need to enhance the production of the next generation of hardware, of integrated circuit and integrated circuit designers and developers of related novel packaging technologies. Despite the numerous innovations produced by the United States, by US scientists in these technology areas, our country is currently, well, I won't say how we rank, but we currently provide only 12% of the world's manufacturing capacity in semiconductors. The migration of semiconductor manufacturing away from this country, along with the associated research and jobs is obviously caused for great concern for the US and our global competitiveness. The urgency of this issue is reflected in the ships legislation that is currently before our Congress. HBCUs and other minority serving institutions are poised to help address this challenge by producing the helping to produce studies, the next generation of engineers, physicists and computer scientists for the US semiconductor industry. HBCUs, because while HBCUs represent only 5% of the US college and university infrastructure, we produce 25% of a bachelor's degrees for black students in the fields of STEM. Although one and one, more than one third actually, of blacks who receive PhDs in STEM actually got their undergraduate training at HBCUs. So HBCUs and other MSIs have to be part of this, the solution to this problem. And we can better engage HBCUs and MSIs by enhancing and building new facilities for training students to work in the semiconductor clean room manufacturing technology areas, by providing funds for new faculty and staff and updating the curricular to educate students in the semiconductor chip design and advanced manufacturing technologies by developing collaborative graduate research partnerships to expose students to the latest ideas and technologies. These would go a very long way to helping us to achieve the diversity needed for the semiconductor industry in this 21st century information economy to strive not only survive but to thrive. That ends my comments. Great, thank you so much, Willie. Next up, we have Dr. Charles Clancy. Great, thank you. So my name is Charles Clancy, Senior Vice President at the MITRE Corporation where I lead MITRE Labs. So MITRE Labs is a large portion of the MITRE, so the MITRE Corporation operates federally funded research and development centers on behalf of the US government. Pretty much every corner of the executive branch has work ongoing with MITRE. And I'm excited, I joined MITRE because I'm really excited about the broad view that we have across really whole of government challenges. A year ago, we launched a group called MITRE Labs which is around half the technical staff of MITRE Corporation. And it's really focused on really going from whole of government kinds of problems to whole of nation sorts of problems. And we find ourselves in the midst of many whole of nation problems these days from pandemics to climate change and all sorts of other topics. But certainly in the area of critical and emerging technologies, semiconductors represents one of those key challenges. And so it's one of the areas that we've invested internally and are working closely with our federal sponsors to the federal funded research and development centers, but also partnering with industry to try and identify opportunities and solutions. In fact, just two days ago, we released a report from our semiconductor alliance that we established that really lays out a vision for the National Semiconductor Technology Center, which is part of the CHIPS Act that Theresa mentioned. But before MITRE, I spent nine years as a professor in electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. And before that was at the National Security Agency. So I'm excited to join the panel today and talk more about some of these key issues. Thank you, Charles. And next, we will turn to a perspective from Enosa from Dr. Bansali. I am Shaker Bansali. I'm the division director for Electrical, Cyber, and Communication Systems at NSF. And I come to NSF as an IPA. My home institution is part of the International University in Miami. And for those of you who don't know that institution, we are the largest producer of Hispanic engineers and the fifth largest producer of African-American engineers in the country. I think the fourth largest institution by government. Coming back to NSF and what's happening in the space and semiconductors, it has been front and center in our eyes. And we've had multiple workshops where we engage with industry, with universities. Many of the speakers here and many of the participants have participated in those workshops. And that's helping us guide and develop new programs. And the sense of what we heard today morning, that the challenge that we have in front of us requires an integration of technology, innovation, and partnerships, right? And that is the name of a new NSF director that's gonna be launched sometime this year. Tip, our director is a firm believer that the only way to conquer these challenges at speed and scale is partnerships. So partnerships is gonna be critical and re-imagining how we do things that we have done and to kind of keep a future in mind. I think that's the need of the hour. And we're working very aggressively towards that. My words. Thank you, Shekar. And last but not least, we will hear from Todd Junkin from SRC. Thanks, Teresa. Yeah, for those of you that don't know me, I'm Dr. Todd Junkin. I'm SRC's new CEO as of last August. And I was really excited. I'm only the third CEO in SRC's 40-year history and I'm taking over an organization. It's really a trusted advisor for the global semiconductor industry. We have the benefit of being a not-for-profit consortium that helps to organize and lead a vast network, a public-private partnership that has 25 corporate sponsors, three government agencies, over 100 universities, 2,000 faculty and students and 900 industrial liaisons. We've got a shared dedication to research prototyping and workforce development. And we've invested over 2.2 billion in next-gen technology and people, creating over 700 patents and investing in almost 16,000 SRC research scholars that have included bachelors, masters, PhDs and postdocs and many of them boiler makers. You know, in recent years, we've been pivoting our agenda to an SRC 2.0 to really steer technologists towards the seismic shifts and the goals that we've outlined in our 2030 decadal plan for semiconductors, which was released with SIA late last year. And maybe it's important to say that since I've come on board, we've also made a broadening participation pledge and a commitment to sustainability so that we have a 10-year technology plan, a 10-year people plan that's more inclusive and a 10-year plan for how we make the semiconductor industry become increasingly echo benign. And as part of that pivot, we've made a significant investments in Purdue with about 48 million since 2018 in really research that spans the full stack from new materials to devices interconnects, et cetera, that will fuel the next generation of 3D chips to heterogeneous integration for two and a half of 3D systems. And of course, new architectures based on strategies like probabilistic computing and neuromorphic computing. And I think that's all great, but if we want to maintain our position as global thought leaders in the US, we've got to commit to collaboratively investing in and both driving the hardware and the talented next generation workforce. And the reason I really took this job is that the story that I was in love with in 2000, I was a chemist and I wanted to race to the atomic length scale. That was great and it worked for 20 years and I had a heck of a ride, but that faster, cheaper, smaller narrative is not winning over the hearts and minds of the next generation of innovators. And we can see that in the drop-off in their interest in making this amazing semiconductor hardware. So I'm here to try to rebirth our narrative to that next generation and get us off this toxic, faster, cheaper, harder, smaller narrative that is not winning their hearts and minds. Happy to be on the panel. Well, thanks, Todd. That is the perfect tie-in to the first question that I would like to ask the panel to address and given the feedback that you just provided in terms of maybe our students are starting to look in other directions and have not been flocking to pursue areas of focus in microelectronics and packaging. The first question is, how can we win the hearts and minds of next generation innovators to pursue a career in microelectronics and advanced packaging technologies? And I thought it would be great for Wellie to kick us off. Okay, first of all, I would say the way to reach the younger generation is to make it real, so to speak, and make it cool. Back when I had hair and I was coming out of school, I thought coming from my background, being the first of my family to attend college, being a local chemist would make all of my peers and my relatives think I was doing something cool. Maybe that's not a motivation for everyone, but it certainly was for me and to a lot of my peers. We wanted to do something that we thought was cool, but also something that was part of a movement larger than we were. My first job was at Oak Ridge, working for the Atomic Energy Commission at that time. And that was perceived to be working on a problem of national interest. And again, I think many of us then, and I think kids now actually, we can appeal to a national pride that actually you're working on something that contributes to a solution to a problem that is important to our country. And finally, most kids don't go to work, don't go to college, at least their parents don't send them to college to expand their minds intellectually. They wanted to get a job. And certainly, I think we have to impress upon them that certainly manufacturing is cool. And there are jobs and that will be increasing sources for employment within the manufacturing regime, especially next generation semi-conductive manufacturing. And it won't just be the same thing. There's a lot of diversity and chances for people to apply their creative juices and make a living for themselves while really making a difference with this country. I'm rambling and going on and on now. So I'll just end it with that. Now, thanks, Willie. I just would like to share that I've oftentimes struggled to explain to the public the work that I have done over the years. And I would expect the same from those of you who work in this area, but now with the chip shortage and supply chain problems, I said it's now a common phrase among the public and so my life got a lot easier. But I wanna open it up to anybody else on our panel who would like to just provide feedback. I think this really gets at the crux of what we need to do, which is inspire the next generation of students. But beyond that, how do we really tap the concept of lifelong learning and bring people from adjacent technologies into this rapidly growing field? So anybody else you would like to add on? I'll just note that I think there's a lot of different ways to help connect with students. And it doesn't always have to happen in the classroom, right? I think experiential learning can be a huge component here to help students really get a sense of kind of what the technology is all about. I'd also note that as you point out the chips, the general supply chain challenges have made this more top of mind for people. But I think there's also really the opportunity to tell the story about really the role that semiconductors play in underpinning all the technology around us, right? So if you wanna go work in artificial intelligence or you wanna go work in, I don't know, 5G, right? There's semiconductors that underpin all of that that need innovation and well, everything from design, development, fabrication and innovation on top of it of how you apply to those challenges. So I think those are some of the themes that would help really reinforce the opportunity in the space and get people interested in it. You know, to echo what Charles was saying, really said, if you think about it in a different way, we're looking at a challenge of inspiring the generations. But I think to a degree, the challenge lies with us, at least in the university, you know what she decided, the faculty. Because if I was to take some of the NSF flagship programs, for example, ERCs, and STCs, right? They're like all the new directorate in the program they're gonna roll out, $5,200 million 10-year programs. The sense of those programs is generally trying to have a compelling idea or a vision that you sell, that excites people and then you have everything around it. So if we were to use that as a framework, in the last 10 years, there hasn't been, I would say semiconductor-focused STC or ERC that has been funded. I mean, every ERC and STC we fund has semiconductor. It's like the new BASF, right? I mean, if I borrow that BASF line, we don't make a lot of things you buy, we make everything you buy better. That's semiconductors today, right? But we've not been able to articulate, even to our own peers, what is exciting and challenging. So I think that the shorter stop I would suggest would be us recognizing the fact that we need to put some bigger programs together and tap into these programs and perhaps use these to transform the curriculum that kind of connects with the students like you said. And maybe I will try to say what I heard in all three, but I wanna talk to the students if they're out there. And I wanna say it in sort of three ways. The next industrial revolution will not happen without chips and without you working on chips. The second point is we need your ideas. The innovations that happen today are miraculous, but we are at the end of our idea thread. We need your ideas and we need your creative breakthroughs in order to be successful in the years ahead. And the third is, and I think Willie kind of said this, you will have a prosperous, interesting career. I can guarantee your family will do well. You will not be bored. You will meet interesting people. It will take you all over the world. I've loved every moment of my career, but we need more of your ideas and your energy to really reach the full potential of that next industrial revolution. All right, thanks everybody. I'd like to kind of go back to the numbers. They're really somewhat staggering when you think of the gap that we have across all different aspects of what we call microelectronics from design to the actual chip manufacturing to packaging. And as I think you've pointed out, many of the programs within universities and at our community colleges have been scaled back over the last 10 to 15 years. And so just to flip that around, how do we scale at a national level? And that would be all the way from thinking about credentialing to PhDs. So Charles, I wonder if we could learn something from the nice framework around cyber. Are there successful best practices that we could take away or if there are any other examples beyond nice? Yeah, so I think we can take, there's a lot of experiences that the cybersecurity discipline has faced massive skill shortages over the last decade. If you go to cyberspeak.org, for example, you can see that there are currently over 460,000 empty cybersecurity jobs in the United States. So the scale of the problem is about 20 times worse than that of the semiconductor industry today. And I think both are on trajectories to continue to widen. So some of the things that we've done in the cybersecurity space really could be examples of things that if deployed early in the semiconductor space may help begin to drive progress. So first, there's the national initiative for cybersecurity education, which was developed by NIST or led by NIST, really interagency team, that sought to really identify the types of jobs that exist in the space, right? And we talked about everything from design to working on the fabrication floor. There's a lot of different jobs in semiconductors and not all of them require a PhD. In fact, many of them don't, but all of this kind of gets muddled together because we don't have a good taxonomy for really understanding what the different kinds of jobs are and what the sorts of skills are that might be necessary for them. And the nice framework in cyber provides that taxonomy that is a starting point. Then there's, well, how do we develop the curriculum at the universities that would help be feeders into all of these different roles? And so, again, in cybersecurity, the National Security Agency and DHS have put together a center of academic excellence program where they actually map out specific knowledge units that need to exist at different parts of your curriculum, either undergraduate or graduate, that you're gonna have a community college version as well. And by developing and providing course materials and sharing among universities, you can really help stand up more scalable programs across the country that then are designed to map in to those career fields. And then on the recruitment side, getting students interested in pursuing this, there's a whole set of different scholarship programs that sit on the front end to try and incentivize people to go through this. And so I would imagine there's a lot there that we could learn from. Now I'll point out that it's only modestly successful, right? Without this, perhaps the problem will be much worse, but the cyber skills gap continues to grow year after year. But again, it would at least be a starting point where we can begin to break the problem down and help understand what different parts of the educational ecosystem. And again, it doesn't have to be a PhD. It could be a vocational re-skilling of people working in other industries as well. So there's lots of different paths that you can break it down into. Well, that's, I was going to ask if there's evidence to show in working, but I think the point that you made that we don't really know where we would be without it. And we have started to move the needle, although the gap remains large. I think that Todd mentioned the scale initiative. This is funded by the Department of Defense that Purdue is leading together with over 15 other university partners that are geographically distributed across the country to really target five different core areas within that broad range where we're trying to do the development of the curriculum and track and follow assessment with industry internships. So I think there's some starting points like scale, additional universities have been involved in that, but certainly putting together a framework would be great, a more formalized framework that could be nationally adopted would be beneficial. I wonder if any of our other panelists have other ideas for how we can scale at a national level. You know, maybe to scale this at national level, if you think of what has happened in semiconductor education broadly beyond the fact that a lot of it's left the curriculum. Now there's kind of a divide. There's schools at the apex who really lockstep in the industry with the industry. And there's the rest of the 95% of the talent pool that comes into the country where the P injection is still the classical P injection on which no device works, right? So there's an increasing disconnect between, that's just my opinion that there's a disconnect between the curriculum and what colleges and community colleges are teaching and where the seat of the industry is. So perhaps, and this is probably also lined up for the industry itself that, you know, it's your survival at stake. Maybe you'll have brand ambassadors or partners that come in and do guest lectures in a really aggressive manner across the country. We do it collectively, like Charles said, you know, nice, we could create maybe a name National Alliance for Microelectronics Education, I don't know, but come together to showcase to the students like Todd was saying, your life would be great, but there's no live example. Somebody's in your classroom and I wanna be him, right? So maybe just reimagine how we do this because we came, we are where we are because of what we do. So doing the same thing is not gonna take us out of this. And this would require a massive participation from industry, I think, in learning role models, learning technology experts, making sure the curriculum is kind of updated and refreshed and ensuring the folks that were going to teach this curriculum appropriately skilled up to ensure that the curriculum is delivered. Yeah, just a tagging on, I think we heard about probably the importance of experiential learning and Shikari, you just mentioned the engagement of industry is gonna be critically important. Probably not only industry, but many of our federal laboratories as well as the engagement of our federal agencies. Todd, I wonder if you could say a bit about how SRC is fostering even stronger relationships with industry, including how SRC can assist as we think about the scalability in terms of the use of internships to complement the students' academic education. Yeah, thanks. We spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that we're trying to bring academics and industry as close together as possible. And I think it's imperative in the semiconductor industry because emerging state of the art is poorly understood by academics at large. I'll be honest that I'm still, I still not met anybody from industry that understands everything, but they have the advantage of teaming rather than having the food fight for individual accomplishments and monetary stream. So when we look at experiential learning, we think of a couple of different things. We try to use grand challenges and benchmarking to organize the work and essentially cross pollinate the interests of different academics and industry stakeholders onto a common discussion, a common reference frame. For example, TLA's are killing everyone. Everybody's got their own TLA's, nobody speaks in English anymore. We don't ever get to the actual thing we're talking about. I still don't know what an ERC is. And we try to infuse member resources and design prototyping compute access education into the scope of work. So the academics are essentially working on things that the industry folks care about and that the students can get trained on and then be more ready for a job. We drive close interactions for sample exchange, characterization, et cetera, through a liaison relationship. But that often takes some time to develop a trust and understanding what is and what isn't possible on sort of a meaningful information cadence. And I think maybe one of the things that folks aren't part of the ERC community don't know is that we spend time on industry webinars. We spend time communicating to our community about why things failed because society has completely forgotten to talk about failure. All we wanna do is get on the cover of a magazine win the next big award and move on. And failure is the first step to success, especially in the semiconductor industry. Well, thanks, Todd. Lily, if you could take it from the perspective of the university reaching out to industry, I think you're on mute. Thank you. In order for the universities to develop the necessary capacity, they need to make an impact in providing students for the industry. We need to have more effective partnerships between industries and industry groups and the universities. And I think, as I said earlier, that needs to be inclusive. Obviously, the main universities that we've already been always been tapping, but we have a national crisis now and we have to get more people in the game and interested in the game and being able to contribute. So I think it has to be not only the federal government who's investing in the solution to this problem, but I think the industry has to address this also. As a former director of this, would you like to share any thoughts perhaps from the perspective of the federal lab? Well, I'll just mention one of the things I said about the national initiative on cybersecurity education at one of the NIST seminars I told, and we had invited a number of the students. I said the national initiative on cybersecurity education is not only nice, but it's also essential. And I would say that this activity, if we could come up with a nice limerick like that, that might be something that catches on and certainly kids would remember. Shankar, I think you could provide some perspective sitting within NSF. We're hearing about the new tech directorate, but even outside of the tech directorate, you've mentioned the engineering research centers, the science and technology centers, but even going beyond their NSF, the new NSF director is all about partnerships. So I wonder if you could share any perspective of how we could leverage NSF and other federal agencies in terms of only driving the needle, in terms of making this connection with industry and federal labs. You know, I would probably go back to what we were saying in the first session, right? We were having a lot of conversations like they're having with the DOC and the entire agency panels and within NSF on what's the right way forward, right? How do you ensure setting of programs and incentivizing systems and opportunities that there is a permanent stop? That they're not just tied to this incentive and the incentive or the initiation, the seed goes away and everything falls apart. So a lot of conversations have taken place on trying to see what would be the method of getting found reacces back to the PI, right? But then it goes back to how deep is the talent pool that can draw on that access if we were to create it? And then it comes down to, okay, what do we have to do to create a much wider talent pool? So a phase that a director uses a lot is the missing millions. And the missing millions are in quote, unquote the missing universities, right? So a lot of our focus off late has been if we create these programs, how do we ensure that they will be inclusive? And there could be two ways. I mean, do we create a program for inclusiveness or we create programs that are structured completely differently that ensure inclusiveness? So we have everything on the table, lots of efforts going on to take our time but get it right to ensure that there is a lasting impact. Great, I was gonna pivot to the fact that I think there's ample and growing evidence that diverse teams and inclusive environments result in greater innovation and impact. So you were really touching on that. Again, just coming back to Willie and you shared some of those in your opening statement, the keys maybe dive a little bit deeper in how we might really be able to move the needle in broadening participation specifically in the microelectronics and packaging areas. Ken, repeat the question please. Oh, sorry. Just building off of Shankar's point, I wonder if you could share some thoughts that go a bit beyond your opening statements about how we can move the needle on broadening participation in the semiconductor area and packaging. I don't think it's rocket science here. I think let's just do it. I think first of all, there has to be a commitment to do it. There have not been very many challenges that we've met in this country that if we had, when we have shown our resolve, our sincere resolve, we haven't gotten it done. And if this is indeed a national problem, we need to first convince ourselves that this is indeed a national problem. And we're all in. We're gonna fix this problem. We're going to have a larger tent. We're going to make everybody feel that they are valuable and that they can provide solutions to the problems. And I'd like to echo what you just said that it's nice to be diverse. It is socially the right thing to do. But in my view, it is good business to do this. As we get greater input from a greater number of people, we end up seeing possibilities that we never could imagine if we have a smaller tent. Thank you. Would any of the other panelists like to add to this really important point? I mean, the missing millions, the impact on innovations is just such an important point. Maybe I'll chime in and just to say that, again, it's a business imperative to really get the kind of innovation we want. We need diversity of thought. We need to unleash the ideas beyond the top five universities, no offense per due. But it's about disseminating that divide between industry and academics, sharing our time and knowledge so that it's a much deeper, more educational relationship than just here's a check and a picture because it's a requirement of some contract. We need to find those partnerships, extend those networks. And I am confident that once we do, the relationships will return 100 fold on the investments and the energy and enthusiasm we get will be very visible immediately. So, Yeah, I think to this end, we all recognize particularly as we want to have more experiential opportunities to provide that kind of hands-on, minds-on training. So many of these areas that the barrier to entry for many institutions, if we think about community colleges and universities that we need to have participate in this basically closing this gap, the barrier to entry particularly as we're looking at the exploration of hardware and manufacturing by academics is very high. Do we have any ideas about how we can address this challenge because there probably isn't enough federal funding in order to close that gap? So do we have any creative, innovative ideas? Well, I mean, you could make it a stipulation as part of some of the Significant Chips Act investment, right? We're gonna invest $52 billion in the US semiconductor ecosystem as a country and industry is gonna co-invest at least that much alongside. You could imagine a set of incentives and requirements associated with those funds that there'd be everything from experiential learning opportunities for students working in the industry that's benefiting from those investments to some amount of production capacity that could be available to universities for their own experiential learning. So I think there's a way you can begin to knit those together as part of how we make some of these large investments. Yeah, so directly as part of the incentives that are being distributed to the companies in order to establish the manufacturing base. To that end, again, the Chips Act, we haven't talked about that very much in this panel, it clearly recognizes the critical importance of talent development. Practically speaking, even if we do see the 52 billion or some fraction there from the Chips Act, it will be a little while and the gap is growing. What can we do now? What can we do in the next six months? And then maybe the bigger question, what do we do if the Chips Act funding doesn't materialize? Kind of open that up to whoever would like to tackle it. Well, I'll say that, I mean, so first of all, the Chips Act itself was authorized as part of the NDAA. So the authorizing language is there and it's just a function of now funding it. So, all right, now, of course, we're waiting on the emergency appropriation that would actually energize it. That doesn't mean that we can't find other organics which is a funding for it. For example, the National Quantum Initiative did not have an appropriation that went along with it. It was authorized, it was established. I mean, obviously it's a lot less money, but it got baked into the president's budget and then got fully brought in line. So, I think regardless of whether there's an emergency appropriation or not, we're gonna have some amount of investment from the federal government, whether it's defense programs or it's commerce in this area. But I think, again, even independent of that, it would be great for industry to be able to, I mean, industry has a vested interest in the human capital supply chain being there to fill the 21,000 jobs you mentioned earlier. And so I could imagine it would be in their best interest to figure out how to solve some of these issues. Yeah, absolutely. We have some really great questions coming in and I think we have about five more minutes on the panel. So, I'm gonna pivot and I'm gonna go to this question. It's not just about engaging the students, it's also engaging the faculty at the organizations that are educating the missing millions. What do they need? Mollie, Shankar, you wanna take a... So, lots needed, right? There's technology upskilling, there's infrastructure upskilling. And like was said earlier, there isn't enough money around, so there's networking, right? So, we need to probably think in terms of, and the great thing about CHIP-SAC terror size that at least it got a sort of talking and coming to the same platform. So, I think whether the money comes or not, if we lose this momentum, it's our loss, right? So, the community has to come together. The federal agencies generally tend to respond, right? But it has to be led by the community. So, the institutions, the universities, the colleges, the industry, I think need to form an alliance, come with the framework. Charles shared a report that's on the NSTC side, right? So, if we had a framework of partnerships that seems sustainable, where we go back to the idea of like, it's okay to share, right? It doesn't, not every curriculum has to be invented at every school, right? The nice framework where you can create a set of master curriculum, master experiences. Some of them can be low cost, not everything has to be high cost. And create an infrastructure. I think we could get there much faster than we think we can. There's an opportunity here. Really? And you're on mute. I also think that we need to fundamentally look at the issue of tenure and probably look to it, allowing more consideration for tenure based on more applied research and less fundamental research, if you will. So, people who would make significant contributions in this area would be given as much as someone who does something more fundamental that might lead to a Nobel Prize, maybe not that. But certainly this is an issue of national importance. And I think we need to treat it that way. And also, I think I would say, sort of coming from the political realm somewhat that we need to let our elected officials know that this is not an issue for us to be playing politics around. This is of extreme importance to the security of our country. And regarding passing the chips back or something like that, let's find something else to play politics around. This is essential. And this needs to move forward. Maybe towards that end, Teresa, I think it's important to understand that industry can come together. Every day of my life is bringing companies together and getting on the same page for shared initiatives. They're looking for trust in their relationships, but they will go with speed wherever they need to for the technology future they think. I think the thing that's important is that the governments, the nations around the world can help to sort of tilt where that happens. And so the US government has a really great opportunity to make sure the US remains at the forefront of this global thought leadership, but industry does not have ultimate patience. They will go elsewhere and they are being suited. So I think we need to have a sense of urgency and strike upon this opportunity. To that end, we have a question and a comment that came in from that Kelly, the chief technologist and CTO of IPC, very much enjoying the panel. And he would like the panel to comment on advancements beyond semiconductor development and looking at the entire ecosystem, including IC substrates, OSAT, PCB fabrication and the final hardware assembly. Todd, would you be willing to open the aperture a bit and provide some feedback? Definitely. I mean, we've been investing in heterogeneous integration trying to do what we can to make sure that America understands this is the essential frontier for semiconductor and system innovation in the years ahead. We can't decommit from chip making and monolithic integration. We've got to keep that as a national treasure, but it's this packaging frontier heterogeneous integration that's really the space we need to inspire. So I encourage folks to look out on the SRC website at the Decadal Plan. We worked with thought leaders from industry and academics this summer to release a workshop recommendation on microelectronics and advanced packaging technologies. That is a nice compliment to the NSTC document that Charles put into the comment link for the audience here. So I think between those two documents, you can really see a nice vision on how we might reshore that innovative front. So I know we've fit 150, but if the panelists are okay, I think we have a couple more great questions. So why don't we try to squeeze a few more minutes out of this panel session? And I'd like to go to Charles on this question. What role should the federal government play across the various agencies to incentivize workforce and education opportunities across the field? Well, I mean, I think, well, first of all, that we need an integrated strategy. I think a challenge I've observed over the last several years is that there are these big hard technology competitiveness challenges and a somewhat fractured and disorganized response across different parts of government. I think I witnessed a lot in 5G, for example. And so there kind of needs to be somebody in charge and there needs to be a national strategy that everybody is executing against that's coordinated out of the White House. And otherwise you'll have different parts of the executive branch pushing in different directions, destructive interference. The goal is to have constructive interference across the board. So one, really a national strategy that's got leadership from the White House and focus that can help organize across. Specifically on the education front, right? There's a lot of different agencies that have a role to play in that from the Department of Education to NSF. Certainly in cybersecurity, we saw NIST and DHS and NSA get very involved, right? So I think you've got to look at the places where there's the technical expertise within the government as well that could be leveraged to help inform the education programs that we might roll out. Again, there's lots of different options from ROTC-like programs to scholarship programs. One interesting question, though, is many of the scholarship programs that have been done in the past involve some sort of service commitment back to the government. And I would wager that of those 22,000 jobs you cite, probably not very many of them are federal employees. So I think we might need to think a little bit differently about some of the scholarship incentives and to get that workforce where it needs to go, not just into the federal government. Yeah, and building on that, I think this does need to be our last question, but it takes us back to experiential learning and internships. And I think everybody really sees the value and importance of these opportunities to our students. Question is related to the gap between the numbers of students and the need of industry relative to the availability or number that industry appears to be opening up for the students to engage. So I think, Todd, I don't know if you would be in a position, again, representing many companies. Are there things that we can do to work with our industry partners to kind of open up more opportunities? Are there ways that we could deploy some of those within universities? Yeah, I mean, I think we work really hard at this. We work really hard at this. We set a goal for, I believe, getting 150 students into internships and hires with our member companies. And we actually just told the board yesterday that we had achieved 172. So, that doesn't put a dent in your 21,000. Unfortunately, I'm trying to grow my students by five to 20X, but in the means of our community, that's really good. I think ultimately inspiring scientists and young innovators is really connecting them with people within the companies. You guys have seen this in academic settings where you bring folks in to talk about what they do and why they find their careers to be exciting. You can unleash a power that is really second to none. So I think it's just mapping those points of connection and doing it in ways that don't ask a lot of very busy people's time to achieve a result. And so create energy, resource appropriately and break down the walls that naturally separate us. I think we better wrap up because the next panel, panel number three is going to begin at two o'clock and we'd like to provide a short break. But I think again, one of the key takeaways is that the ongoing advocacy for all the groups that are represented here from industry to our federal laboratories, our FFRDCs, our agencies is just, it's critically important to just make sure that we continue to underscore the importance of microelectronics. As many of our panelists said, it's at the heart of so many of the critical technologies and to inspire our workforce. So we are going to summarize the outcomes of this panel session. I think many good concepts were, great concepts were presented. So we will be sharing those back out. So once again, thanks to the panelists and thanks to the audience for great questions. And Mark, I think I'm going to turn it back over to you. Okay, thank you, Teresa. And thank you, panel two for a great discussion. You've certainly given us a lot to think about and mow over. We are going to take a very short break, three minutes, and then we will commence with panel three at two o'clock. Welcome back everybody. This is Mark Lundstrom again. So we've had two great panel discussions and we're ready to start our third discussion. And this one will focus a bit more on the special needs for the microelectronics workforce in the defense-related electronics. And I'll keep the introduction of the moderator short so we can save time for discussions. Our moderator is Professor Steve Goodnick from Arizona State University. Steve has had a lot of roles over the years there. I think department chair and associate dean of research and several other roles. He and I have been colleagues in semiconductor research for a long time. So Steve, I'll turn it over to you. Well, thanks for that introduction, Mark. And it's really a pleasure to moderate this panel on microelectronic workforce development for the defense and national security. And we have an outstanding set of five panelists which I'll introduce in a minute. I just wanted to make a few remarks at the beginning. First of all, to say that while I'm at Arizona State University I'm actually on sabbatical leave at Sandia National Laboratories right now in Albuquerque. And these opportunities for faculty to go and spend time at national laboratories, defense laboratories and DOE laboratories, I think is one excellent opportunity for helping with the microelectronics workforce. I have several students and former postdocs actually employed at national labs. And that's partly due to these interactions. The unique aspects of the microelectronics for the defense and national security have to do with the fact that they are, as opposed to the commodity technologies that we've been talking about so far in terms of chip manufacture, many of the needs are targeted technologies for specific application issues. In particular, what's needed are secured and trusted manufacturing addressing cybersecurity needs because of trying to avoid things like Trojan horses in the micro processes or some things like that. And so there's special needs in terms of just the security needs for manufacturing. But then there's particular special needs within the defense communities such as microelectronics for harsh environments, things like ionizing radiation, electromagnetic interference, high temperatures operating in nuclear environments. These are all special areas which are much narrower and itches than that of silicon CMOS processing. There's also a much broader material base. There's things beyond silicon, including for example, three, five materials for very high frequencies, communications, wide bag gap semiconductors for power applications and a broad sets of materials that are associated with electromagnetic, communications, electromagnetic applications and of course, being able to sustain interference. So often these technologies are so specific that they can't be provided by private industry because basically the customer base is a customer of one. And so these often have to be provided internally by the national labs and other or trusted foundries. And so these are some of the unique aspects of the microelectronics industry for defense and national security. From the workforce development perspective, probably the most challenging aspect is the fact that most of the jobs require US citizenship or at least the vast majority of jobs. And at the same time, there's often a need for more advanced degrees because of the specialized nature of the work. And that's in the face of the fact that the workforce pool that's being produced by universities is increasingly international, greatly in graduate programs. And as we talked about in Theresa's panel, an obvious way of increasing the workforce of domestic scientists and engineers, US citizens is to basically address the inequalities of the representation of for example, women and underrepresented minorities in our science and engineering programs. If we were able to actually mirror the representation in these programs, the demographics of society as a whole, we would easily have twice the number of qualified domestic students that would be qualified to work in the defense and security sector because of having the necessary citizenship requirements. So we hope that this will be addressed. And I should mention that one thing that I'm engaged with is that I'm on the board of directors for the Inclusive Engineering Consortium, which has received support from the National Science Foundation. This is a consortium of HBCUs, Hispanic serving institutes and Native American institutions which broadly are trying to pool the resources in order to partner with industry, with research one universities and other entities in order to provide a joint access to facilities and to students. And there's been a number of workshops held over the last year. And most recently we had a workshop on basically partnerships in different technology sectors and one of those in particular focused on semiconductors and the needs for the semiconductor workforce. So I think there are, this is a good organization in order to partner with we're trying to address some of these issues. So I'd like to introduce our five panelists and then I'll let them make some brief remarks following that. The first panelist I'd like to introduce is Scott Frost and he's from Analytics Service Incorporated, or ANSR, we're an industrial-based engineer. And basically Scott provides full-time support to the industrial-based analysis and sustainment program called IBAS. And he leads and has lead responsibilities for IBAS's programs called the National Imperative for Industrial Skills Initiative. Our second panelist is also from ANSR, that's Catherine Ortiz and she's a principal analyst for ANSR, the president and founder of Defined Business Solutions, LLC. In Kay's role at ANSR, she supports the Department of Defense IBAS program that I just mentioned, within the Office of Industrial Policy and serves as the outreach lead for the National Imperative for Industrial Skills Initiative. And by the way, I'm giving very abbreviated introductions to the panelists, but you can find their full bios on the website. The third panelist is Nathan Nolan, who's at Sandia Labs. And in his 10 years at Sandia, Nathan has led research and development efforts for radiation hardening by design, advancing circuit modeling of radiation efforts and product engineering for high reliability, high consequence systems. He currently leads the Advanced Microsystems for Radiation Effects Development, where he's responsible for trust and radiation hardness assurance of microsystems for national security applications. Our fourth panelist is also at Sandia, Ronnie Kellam, and Ronnie is the program lead for the Securing Top Academic Research and Talent at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, acronym START HBCU. And this program is at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, and it's housed within the Chief Research Office. The START HBCU program is designed to increase Sandia's diversity pipeline by creating specific partnerships to increase research collaborations, expose students to the mission of Sandia and increase Sandia's awareness of each HBCU's capabilities and area of expertise. Finally, our final panelist is Cara Perry. And Cara is the Education and Workforce Development Co-lead for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering, which is a very large acronym, and OUSDRE, the Trusted and Assurance Microelectronics Program. She also serves as the Strategic Radiation Hardening Electronics Council Workforce Development Co-lead. And so these are our five panelists who all bring unique expertise and background to this panel on the workforce needs for the defense and security industry and microelectronics. And I'm gonna start with Scott and let Scott make some brief remarks and then we'll go in the order that I've just presented. Scott. Steve, thanks for the intro. Can you hear me all right? Yes. Okay, wonderful. And thanks to the Purdue team for hosting this important session today. As Steve said, I support the Industrial-Based Analysis and Sustainment Program, part of the Industrial Policy Office, and that office has a primary focus on defense industrial-based health and associated risks. Before I go further, I should say I'm representing Adele Ratcliffe, Ms. Adele Ratcliffe, who is, and Kay is as well, and Adele is the director of the IBAS program. She sends her regrets. She was dual-committed today and so I'm representing her as is Kay. And for some additional full truth in advertising, I'm an Ohio State Buckeye who happens to be on a day off and I'm traveling with my wife by car from Washington, DC to Columbus, Ohio for the OSU Purdue game tomorrow. So I hope you all don't hold that against me too much, but I'm stopped right now, hold up in a Panera bread. They were nice enough to turn off the music and allow me to do the conference from there. If it gets too noisy, let me know and I'll mute in between my words. So I won't belabor the problem. I'm sure that you spent a fair amount of energy on that, on the hyper-competitive globalized nature of the problem, the offshoring of our production capacity, the multi-decade atrophies, if you will, of not only our production capacity, but the decades-long disconnect that's growing between society and the manufacturing profession of which microelectronics, of course, is a key part. And of course, offshoring is a constant theme in the microelectronics business. So Deloitte does a recurring study and they've recently put out an assessment that there's a requirement for about three and a half million manufacturers in this country, but they're projecting by mid-decade shortfall of about 2 million unfilled jobs. And so that's just the validated manufacturing jobs, not counting all the offshore capacity that we have. So much more to talk about on the problem statement, but we won't go there, we don't need to. But what that is driving is essentially a recalibration of the Defense Department's view on how they should be marching into this space. And we traditionally have looked to the OEMs, look to industry, look at big academia, look to the Department of Education and Labor and others to really solve any workforce problems. We're a paying customer, we're the largest buyer of acquired systems in the federal enterprise, but we don't solve workforce problems or so we felt. But we've recognized that this problem has really grown beyond the risk tolerance and the capabilities of industry to solve alone. And the Defense Department as a major stakeholder and buyer needs to look at how we are sharing risk and helping to solve the problems. So this has led to within the IBAS office what we're calling a new initiative called the National Imperative for Industrial Skills where that's a very broad definition of what we mean by industrial skills. And what you have on the screen here, thanks Christina for putting that up is kind of our iconic graphic depiction of what we call the industrial skills workforce development ecosystem model. There's nothing complex about it. There's more of an elegance to it. It's a common touch point that we feel that all major stakeholders in the workforce development pipelines in the workforce development training and education system can look at and recognize that it embodies certain principles. There is a kind of a secret sauce to this but several of the principles revolve around not only public-private partnerships and the value of those but rebalancing those partnerships and how risk is shared. Other principles that really talk about focusing more on the interfaces in the model versus say the actual, say community college or university that's producing students but how are those relating to one another? And perhaps the very center, the centroid of this diagram is what we call common industry relevant, industry driven interchange activity. And because the micro-electronic space is perhaps mostly focused on the four year tracks, engineering and design tracks. But fear not, it's a big part of this model and we believe that there's a continued blending of the interest in the center of this diagram where perhaps there's a more diffuse boundary between the shop floor, the factory floor skills even in micro-electronics and say the design and engineering tracks. So there are other principles that are behind this model but as courtesy to everybody else I'll shorten it with that and won't go into it any deeper except to say that over the last couple of years we've invested about $80 million in prototyping best practices across this space. And Congress has really recognized the value and a lot of that is congressional added to a very small IBAS program which is about a core of $10 million a year. So but we've been added over $100 million in the last couple of years. And so we're working to put more and more of that into our actual program. So Congress recognizes the problem as well initiatives like scale are perfectly aligned with this model. And so we look forward to future partnering and teaming with Kara and her team and Peter and others, other activities like that. One other principle that's important and I'll get off the stage and that is we recognize that there's also a primacy of local uniqueness of each problem yet in the microelectronics business we also recognize the importance of a national integrated effort. And it's a blend of those two, focusing on what are the local challenges and regional challenges but also recognizing the need for a national effort. So with that, I'll hand it back over to you, Steve. Thanks Scott. So the next panelist is Catherine Ortiz. That's okay, I'll turn it over to you. Great, thank you and good afternoon everybody. Thanks to Purdue University for the opportunity to speak at this workshop. It has been an amazing conversation to date and I thank you Steve for moderating this panel. Scott gave some good background on the IBRAS program and on the National Imperative for Industrial Skills Initiative. My remarks are going to really focus on three activities that we have underway, three of the projects that we've invested in that connect to the broader microelectronics workforce challenges. So as Scott explained, the National Imperative ecosystem talks about both the four year degree education path and beyond as well as the shorter career technical or CTE path usually offered by community colleges and other specialized training entities. As was mentioned in the first panel and again in the second panel, electronics technicians and operators are essential to the microelectronics ecosystem and they are in great demand along with the engineers and the scientists that are going through the four year degree path. So at IBRAS, we have deliberately decided to invest in developing an electronics technician workforce focusing more on the shop floor and I'm going to highlight three efforts that can provide a good connection to scale and the microelectronics engineering efforts that others have talked about today. The first project I wanna highlight is at Vermont Technical Manufacturing Collaborative. This project supports the development of Advanced Manufacturing Center at Vermont Technical College VTC. They offer training in traditional manufacturing skills like welding and machining, but they're also developing a comprehensive education path for electronic technicians and operators. We've also as a second project invested in developing a new category of workers called the system engineering technicians. This is through Auburn University's system engineering technology or SET project. The SET project is producing technicians who can use the model-based techniques tools who can do the time-consuming work of capturing system designs using modeling software, integrating digital tools and managing all the associated data to free up the engineers from some of those more time-consuming and tedious tasks. Finally, we have invested in a small effort that began as a way to address the shortage of printed circuit board technicians. It's our electronics manufacturing technician education project. It's a three-way collaboration between Arrowmark, Michigan Technological University and Calumet Electronics. Under this project, individual universities team with an industry partner to develop workers for its hard to fill electronics manufacturing positions. Scott and I will be happy to give you more information about these projects offline, but I wanted to highlight just some of the ways that we're looking at the Department of Defense to fill some of these gaps, to build this talent pipeline and ways that we could collaborate with scale and its partner. We look forward to further discussions. Thank you. Thank you, Kay. Well, I'll turn to our third panelist and that's Nathan Nolan. Nathan, it's all yours. Yes. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. So yes, I work at Sandia National Laboratories. I am a hiring manager. I am in the thick of the trenches right now trying to find people to come work at a national laboratory to do government work. And so I'm competing against 21,000 other job opportunities that you heard in the last panel, trying to encourage people to why should you consider a career in U.S. government or working for U.S. government problems? And Sandia has kind of been a unique place because we are a national laboratory. We have some name recognition unlike some other, perhaps, government laboratories. We do get out and publish and have pretty active interactions with a lot of university partners, a lot of other labs and industries across the nation. But still, it's hard to entice people to want to apply and come to these kinds of jobs. We do have some uniqueness in the fact that we kind of sit at a place and I work for the Mesa facility, which is the name that we give to our Microsystems Engineering Facility where we actually manufacture silicon and gallium arsenide and compound semiconductor chips for the National Nuclear Security Agency. And so we have sort of a captive supply chain, a captive integrated device manufacturing from the ground up. We have the fab technicians, we have the process engineers, we have the device engineers, we have the layout engineers, we have the reliability engineers, we have the material scientists and we have the physicists. And we have all of these things integrated together because at least in some instances, our nation has always recognized the fact that yes, we need to have an assured supply of the most critical elements for our most critical systems. And so Sandia fits in a nice place where we supply that. And it provides a set of unique challenges for us as well. We're not making the three nanometer chips. We research in the three nanometer chips, but we're not making them and that makes it less attractive to students when you tell them, well, we're still working in 350 nanometer technologies. That was before they were born. But it provides a unique set of opportunities because it has to be extremely reliable and extremely hard in these extreme environments, as you say. One of the sayings that we like to share around Sandia that helps give the sense of the mission to people is that we have this concept of always never. Our systems must always work when they are needed and never at any other time. So that comes with a huge set of challenges for trust, for security, for safety, for reliability, for guarantees that these things work in environments that we cannot create. And so how do you do that? It takes a lot of deep understanding of the physics and every piece that goes into this from the atoms up to the systems. And there are huge challenges in taking effects and phenomenon that occur at the physical level and understanding how that's gonna impact you at a system level. Is this thing going to work or not in whatever environment I put it in? And so there's just a vast array of scientific and technical challenges that are frankly unknown to too many students because they don't see that aspect of government that they don't see that aspect of national security. We use nuclear weapons every day to keep this nation safe, but it's not the Googles and it's not the Facebooks. It's not the things that are in front of the students day in and day out, moment by moment when they pick up their cell phone and start Googling something. And so it's not forefront in their mind. And yet it comes with this huge array of interesting and great challenges that frankly inspire me and many of us at Sandia to dig into the why and what's really going on here? Because again, we can't just do a pass fail test and say, oh, we're good because we don't have that pass fail test. We have to understand and be able to extrapolate. And so we need that deep understanding. And so having students that have that kind of passion that want to know what's going on at the very fundamental levels and then be able to apply it all the way up at the system level and work with teams of people from all of those various disciplines to make the system work. The other cool thing about what we do and a message that needs to get to students is there's software that we do but there's hardware as well. And the cool thing about it is that we fly what we build. So it's cool to see something that you build, get flown and work in actual real environments. And so we have a lot of work in front of us and we are working hard to try to reinvigorate our engagements with universities and the industries and strengthen and grow and build our intern programs and our research portfolios to make sure that we are getting students excited about the things that we are doing early on in their careers and then they're interested and willing and able to commit. One last point I'll make is the need again for, because it's a national security application we do need US students, students who can get clearances. We typically look for people who, it helps us to have people who are willing to make long-term career commitments. The model of people moving around every three to five years that you might find in industry really is difficult for a national securities lab that has to maintain systems over 30 years. And the system that you started building 30 years ago you might need to still be working on today. And so having some longevity and some overlap from the more experienced folks to the newer folks coming in is critical and key for us. And I'll stop there. Okay, thanks, Nathan. So our next panelist is also from Sandia and that's Ronnie Kellam. Ronnie, it's all yours. Hello, Steven, can you hear me okay? Yes, perfect. Okay, thank you so much for having me. So I agree with everything that Nathan said, also being a Sandian, so I won't belabor a lot of those points, but from my perspective, being inside the chief research office where we build a lot of relationships with universities, particularly underneath our academic program structure, we have the need for students. But the unique piece is that although we're like other government agencies, we're not a funding agency. And so we have to rely heavily on building relationships, building relationships with the universities, building relationships with the students, building relationships between universities so that we can identify the unique capabilities that those universities have so that we can work together and that the universities can work together. I particularly work with historically black colleges and they're heavily relationship-based, right? Those students have never heard of Sandia. We're not on Google, we're not putting out commercials for them to see. So the cool work that Nathan was mentioning is happening, but they don't know about it. And so in order for them to become abreast to what does the national security space look like, what are we doing in that space? What is super important? If you can think it and attach national security to it, Sandia's probably doing it, but they're not aware. And so we wanna make sure that we start to build those relationships by influencing curriculum, exposing them to the work that we're doing, getting them to know our scientists and engineers and really putting our best foot forward to make institutional commitments to these institutions. We also recognize that there's a heavy undergraduate population at some of these minority institutions and the graduate population is not always as large. And so leveraging our other university partners such as Purdue University and some of the other institutions that we have relationships with, excuse me, to start to build that pipeline to where they can see Sandia on the other side and that Sandia can help coax them through the undergraduate experience as we're influencing their curriculum. The graduate experience as if they decide to go to a university that we already have a relationship with, we can still continue to talk to them about the importance and the value of the national security space, the microelectronic space or whatever technical space that we feel is imperative to our mission, we wanna make sure that we're embedding that early and often. And so Sandia has a lot of challenges with being in FFRDC and having some barriers to how we do that. And so looking at the unique ways that we can influence students and influence universities and be embedded in universities so that we can start to change the way that change and influence the way the pipeline actually looks. So I will stop there. Thank you very much, Ronnie. Our last panelist is Cara Perry and I'll turn it over to you, Cara. Thanks, and I'll keep my comments short. You've heard a lot about today. Several people have mentioned scale throughout all the discussions and as part of the trusted and assured Michael electronics education workforce development technical area, I am the program manager of scale and I lead the government oversight committee. So scale, I'll just give you a short description. It's a unique workforce development effort and we have created a public private academic partnership and that really is the key to this. So one of the key things is we gather input from the stakeholders, excuse me. By stakeholders, I don't mean just government agencies and of course we include those DOD, DOE, NASA, NDA, et cetera but we also include the defense industrial-based companies and we heard from a lot of those companies, several of those companies earlier today and I think it's important that this effort be a combination of the two government agencies and the private sector working together. The university consortium is led by Purdue and what it does is it takes the needs of the stakeholders as I said, we gather that information from them and then they convert that into training the students so that they have the skills that the stakeholders need in their workforce. And as Nathan mentioned, they need US citizens and this is a common thread, right? So all students associated with scale are required to be US citizens. And so there's a lot of things that have been mentioned earlier today as far as things that we want to see in workforce development that scale is already doing so it's nice to hear that we seem to be on the right track. We've had great success so far and while it is a great first step in the right direction, we also need to make sure that we are trying to bring in students at an earlier age. We need to make sure that middle school and high school students hear about microelectronics and that is something that they can learn about further when they go to an undergraduate school. And in addition to that, once you get the students hired, you need to make sure that they're getting, continuing education and perpetually upskilling the existing workforce. So I'll stop there. I'm looking forward to the panel today, thanks. Thanks, Carrie. And thanks to all the panelists for that great overview of the needs and issues. And the defense and security industry. I'd like to start by, maybe it's been talked about already, but, and we've already talked about the problems of citizenship, of course, but even for US students, what do you consider the greatest challenges in attracting US students to the microelectronics for defense and national security sector? Anybody wants to chime in or if not, I'll call on you. I'll go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. This is Kara. I'll just briefly say that one of the largest challenges, there's two that I see. The first one being that as Ronnie said earlier, students just don't realize that this is a career path that they can take, that microelectronics is something that they can go into. That's the first challenge. And I think the second challenge is bringing in the US citizens, especially when you're talking about graduate students in microelectronics, the majority of them are foreign nationals. And I think that if we're able to get more students into undergraduate degrees and get them graduated, then that will help us solve the graduate student problem of the US citizens. Yeah, Kara, thank you. I'll just amplify that. I mean, you sort of hit on one of the things that I made in my opening remarks was that they're just not aware of the kind of work and the opportunities that exist there. I think also that we have a really big challenge in competing with some of the big tech things for name recognition, for the glamor and glitz that seems to go with it. And frankly, as government employees, we often are challenged to meet the salary and benefits that they can get in industry. And so it takes somebody who has a real commitment to the mission and a real passion for the work. And where we offer the advantage, I'll say over industry, as far as my perspective is, is especially in a group like mine, is you have the opportunity to interact with people at every level of the organization in every venue of technical activity. And you're not siloed and you're an edge engineer or you're a photo lithography engineer or you're a test engineer, but you work across all of it. And so that provides a lot of stimulus and innovation for the students and the people who are able to work in those environments. Any other comments from the panelists? I'll just jump in here, Steve, with a tagging on to what Kara and Nathan said about the lack of awareness. And if you take that down to the technician level, I think there is a broad misunderstanding of what education level is needed to work in the microelectronics or semiconductor industry. And if you look at the two-year technical path through the community colleges, people are able to work and contribute in semiconductor industry, even with just a two-year degree. And I think we can build excitement around that area for the people for whom a four-year degree is just out of their reach. I'll add to that. I agree that technologists and folks with two-year degrees are absolutely essential to what we do. The other end of the spectrum is absolutely essential to what I do in particular as well, right? I have to have some PhDs who understand the deep physics and the modeling and the connections to circuit design and the whole integration picture. And so it takes a number of years to develop that skill set too, but you're right. It covers the whole spectrum really is what we're looking for. Well, this brings up the issue of the pipeline because it was mentioned, we have to increase the pipeline. And wondering if you can share maybe what the best approaches would be to increase, particularly the number and diversity of US students coming in to pipeline, which may means starting even preschool and high school and so forth, if you could share maybe best practices or what are some approaches that would help us increase that pipeline? I think one of the biggest best practices or philosophies I would say is that students have to be able to see themselves doing something, right? And if they can't see it and they can't envision it and they haven't seen someone that looks like them or comes from where they come from, it's hard for them to envision that that's what they're gonna be doing six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years from now. And so I think making sure that when we talk about pipeline that we're giving students the opportunity to see themselves in that work, at whatever level that means. So if it's in high school, exposing students to the different types of things they can do at that level, once we get to the undergraduate level, it's exposing them to whether it's internships, whether it's just people coming on their campus to talk about the work that they're doing. So that continuous exposure allows them to say, I think I can do that. I think that that's something that, one, I might be interested in, but also it's achievable, right? There has to be the willingness for the student to understand that that's something that they can do and it's tangible for them. And so, as we talk about different pipeline activities, making sure the student can see themselves all the way through is super imperative. That's a good point. Does the IBASC project have any sort of outreach recruitment strategies trying to get, especially into these two year degrees, how to recruit students out of high school? You're muted, Scott. I'm not, can you hear me now? Yeah, perfect. Well, first of all, it's a simple math problem in a numbers game that, and it's not in our favor, the growing gap between supply and demand that we're facing. But the other thing that is important is to recognize the sensitivity of the decision points in a person's life and the importance of perhaps pushing the focus area to the left a bit on a time scale. And we're seeing that the middle school point in a person's life is where we really have to start working that a lot harder. Because if you're starting to push the messages in high school, it's often too late. Perhaps not so much in microelectronics, but in a lot of the two year tracks, middle school is becoming more and more of a prominent point that we need to work. So I would just, I would point to that. And of course, even earlier, start getting this very limited population, this shrinking population of supply, domestic supply of students, start working them earlier in their life and perhaps working the influencers, the parents and the others. So that's what I would say. Okay. Another question I wanted to ask was, this has to do with, what are the key differences between the microelectronics needed in the defense sector versus the commercial industry? And how does that impact skills needed for working in the defense and security industry? I wanna piggyback on some of Nathan's comments. One, I think there's a real advantage in the excitement of being able to work across the entire portfolio of microelectronics when you're in defense, you're not limited, you're not siloed, you have the opportunity to work a very broad, wide aperture set of challenges. And that's exciting. But also just the fact that you very directly can serve your nation and national security and economic security, you can, we can play that hard because it's the truth. And I think that plays on another motivation that behind getting someone to decide to come into this path in the first place. So those are puts that I would make. I'll add that, I mean, that's very good. And I'll kind of piggyback on the question from last time is those things that we could be doing, I think what scale is providing an opportunity for is very, very good. And I've taken advantage of it a few times is the ability to get passionate researchers, passionate engineers from this community in front of students and help them see themselves in this role, help them recognize the magnitude of the challenges and the excitement that is there and communicate that national patriotic pride that many of us feel day by day, that's what gets us up in the morning is we know we're serving our nation and what we do today matters to the security and safety of our people and our country. And that's a powerful thing for many of us that are in this area. I've worked in industry and I've worked in government and I've worked at government contractors in my career. The industry I confess was a very, very fun time because we were very busy. There's a lot of activity going on. You're producing stuff, producing a lot of stuff and you're living in a very data rich environment but industry comes with some challenges as well and the fact that there's a lot of up and down that there's years that are really good and years that are not so good. And so you're hiring people and then you're not hiring people or laying them off. One of the advantages that someplace like San Diego or many of the government agencies offer is there's a lot more stability in our field and in our area that we're not gonna have a lot of this up and down turn that the industry goes through. And so there's a lot of stability. You know that you can have a 30 year career if you want it you can stick around and you're gonna be doing exciting things. I like to say that every time we turn on a radiation beam and put a part in it, we learn something. You think you might know what's gonna happen but as soon as you turn on the beam no test plan survives contact with the first beam. We're always learning something and it's exciting in that regard too. Great, thanks. Yeah, job security is definitely an advantage at in the national labs. And I think that is an attractor for students who wanna have a stable career. We're getting towards the end of our time. I'd like to ask about continuing education. I'm wondering what are the needs in the defense industry and government sectors in terms of continuing education and upscaling for employees? Is that an active area within, you know DOD labs and Sandia, for example? So yes and no. I mean, we, you know because we tend to hire a lot of PhDs there's seems to be less opportunity for continuing education in the case. I mean, we do encourage and promote a lot of short courses and conference attendance and making sure that you're presenting at conferences and building your creds and your knowledge base that way. Sandia offers some limited opportunities for, you know students without the PhD to go get a master's degree, for example. But those have tended to be very highly competitive and challenging to get into. Certainly, you know, we offer tuition assistance and things of that nature and that's key to what we do. We have a very active postdoctoral program. So a lot of the people that we hire into Sandia ultimately come through our postdoctoral program where we hire the post-docs as post-docs. They have two to three years to work on a very focused specific research program, get some publications, get some name recognition build that program. And then if they're successful at that then they usually have an opportunity to then become staff members and full-time employees of the labs. I'll answer that. Go ahead, Caroline. My comments pretty quick. I think that this is actually something that the government in general needs to improve on. I think that it's key to keeping employees in those positions and not going back to other industry. You have to keep training them, you have to keep letting them grow or you're not gonna be able to keep them and I think it's definitely something we have to improve on. We're almost out of time, but let me pick a question from that's been posed to the panelists. Are there any organizations students can join as members that might be related to or give them more knowledge about the defense and government sector other than things like IEEE, et cetera? Yeah, I was going to say IEEE, but that one's kind of an obvious given. Certainly there are a handful of conferences that a lot of our work is presented at. So me specifically, I work in radiation effects. There's a very good conference for the nuclear and space radiation effects that's open. Get you a nice introduction to the community. A lot of academic researchers present there, a lot of government researchers present there and it's a nice way to build that relationship. They provide good short course material and poster opportunities and other conferences like that I think would be really good opportunities for students to see what's going on. And frankly COVID has kind of been a benefit in that regard because a couple of those conferences have gone virtual and allowed a little bit more attendance. Presumably they may continue in a hybrid format going forward and so those are ways to encourage students to perhaps get a little bit more exposure to the kind of work and research that's going on in at least one small field and there are others, of course. And sticking in the theme of conferences rather than membership organizations, there's the GO-MAC tech, which is the government micro-circuits and technology conference that has not happened for the past two years because of COVID, but it looks like it right now is scheduled to take place in March in Miami. So I'll put the website in the chat for everybody, over. Great. Just one final question and it's somewhat related to one in the Q and A and this goes back to comments that Ronnie made too. How important are personal relationships with individual faculty, for example, universities or, you know, individuals within the university? How important are those, for example, in students coming to work within the government and security sector? So I'll start off with that. I would say that they're absolutely critical. Students value their professor's opinions and if the professors are working on your work, if they're doing things that are similar to the areas in which you want to recruit students in, students are being taught by their professors every day and so they're listening to the value that they bring and that relationship is very important if you want to not only recruit the students that are there currently, but to create that longevity, right? The faculty members and the folks at the university are there through generations of students and so if you want to continue that pipeline, you have to be able to build the relationship with the faculty and not only faculty, the administrators and the leadership, the deans as well, you want to continue that pipeline. Anyone else? Yeah, well said, Ronnie. I think that that's absolutely true of probably more than half of the people I've hired in my career have been because I knew their professor. No, no. Well, I see Mark has appeared so I think we've reached the end of our time. I really want to thank all the panelists for the great perspective on these needs within this, within this sector, the defense and security sector. It's been a great discussion and I just want to thank Purdue University and Mark for organizing this whole workshop because it's really been a fantastic day and it's been much needed in this sort of renaissance in the semiconductor industry that we're going through and thank you very much for organizing this. All right, and thanks a lot, Steve, for moderating panel three and for all the members of panel three. You know, maybe we have a minute, I could ask a quick question myself here. Sure. In just thinking about how to address this challenge, I'm asking myself, do we need to increase the engineering pipeline and get more engineering students or do we need to convince more of the current engineering students to choose careers in national labs and defense electronics? My university, like I think most others, we're having surging engineering enrollments now. We're hiring faculty as fast as we can. We're building new classroom buildings as fast as we can. We've heard that there are 21,000 positions open but some fraction of those are related to national labs and defense contractors and the defense industry. Can we address this challenge for defense electronics? Simply by making more of our students aware of the opportunities, a large fraction of our undergraduate students are US citizens, if we can convince more of them to pursue graduate degrees, we'd have more opportunities for people like you, Nathan, to hire US PhDs. So my question is, where should our focus be? Should it be on increasing the pipeline of engineering students or should it be on working with the pipeline that we have and moving more of them into defense careers? So I'll speak to that because I need engineers yesterday. I can't hire enough right now. So I think the urgency of some of the missions that we're facing right now is upon us and we got caught in a kind of a lull of students coming out with any kind of skills or abilities relevant to our work area. And we cannot find enough engineers and the industry is, dare I say it, incestuous enough that people are jumping from one company to another company but we're not increasing the pool. We're just leaving a vacancy where somebody left and went to a different company. And so getting students into our hands as soon as possible is for me personally a high priority because we've got work today that we can't execute that if we don't execute soon, we're in danger of falling behind and that's not a good place for our national security lab to be. Okay, all right. This is for all. I'll just add one real question. I think that a lot of people have referred to this as the war for talent. And I think that that is the wrong approach. I think that as Nathan said, if you're just stealing somebody from a different company and moving them to another, that doesn't really solve the problem at all. You have to increase the pipeline. You have to get into the untapped pools of potential students to solve the problem. All right, well, thank you all. This really is quite a big challenge in front of us. Engineering enrollments are growing rapidly but not rapidly enough. So we have a big challenge ahead of us but we look forward to working with folks like you to address this. I have been asked to try to briefly summarize and we only have a few minutes left and that's sort of impossible for me to do, to summarize the day right now with some key takeaway points. I'll mention one or two things that stand out to me and we will try to summarize some of the key takeaways that those of us on the organizing committee take away from today's meeting and we'll try to get that back to you all and solicit your input in that too and then think about what the next steps are because this is a big challenge ahead of us and we see this as maybe the first in a series of meetings where we can dive deeper into specific actions that we can take. You know, panel one, what I heard from panel one was innovation, innovation, innovation. Companies survival is all about innovating and that we're at an inflection point in the microelectronics industry that we need to do more than just bring chip manufacturing back and increase capacity. As more laws slow, slows innovation is more and more important and we need to increase the pace of innovation and to do that, we need talented engineers. So the workforce is absolutely critical to that as well as new ways of working together to speed the pace of innovation, new modes of collaborations between universities and companies and companies and the industry and the government shared rapid prototyping facilities, more coordination of efforts and things like that. Panel two, a lot of the same messages came across. Talent is the semiconductor industry's most important asset. We heard about the number of 21,000 positions open. The workforce needs are just very large and they'll grow even larger as we reshore semiconductor manufacturing. One of the challenges that we in academia deal with is that many students feel that the semiconductor industry is a mature industry and not the one where it's the most exciting one that they are aware of. But as Todd Junkin of SRC pointed out that as more laws slowing, a seismic shift in the industry is coming. And these are really very exciting times and how do we convey this excitement and all the new opportunities to students to help them consider careers in semiconductor electronics? Shankar Banthali NSF pointed out that there hasn't been a new NSF ERC or STC center funded on semiconductors for 10 years. So we really do have to learn how to articulate what makes this field so exciting to us and convey that to the students. There was also a point made that, given the large needs for the workforce, drawing more women and underrepresented minorities into engineering in general and semiconductors in particular is going to be critical to that. And Willie pointed out that HBCUs represent only 5% of the universities in the US but they produce 25% of the nation's black engineers. So they're an important resource that can help us address this challenge. And then finally here in panel three, a lot of the same themes came through. Scott mentioned that really for decades there's been a disconnect between manufacturing and the rest of the economy. And so not only semiconductor manufacturing but manufacturing in general. And we have to address that for the success of the future of our country. Lots of emphasis that we saw and not only in this panel, but then back in panel one as well about the importance of the need to develop the technician workforce. We heard about the challenges and attracting new hires, how hard it is to compete with companies like Google and Facebook and make students aware of the opportunities that are available in the defense sector. So, lots of challenges but lots of opportunities ahead of a student awareness of the opportunities came across in this panel again and again as something that we need to address to make students understand the opportunities that are there. Well, okay, there's a lot to think about and mull over and that's what I'm going to be doing over the weekend but this has been a terrific day long discussion. I want to thank all of you who participated on the discussion. As I said, we'll try to get some key takeaways back to you all and we'll encourage your input on that as well. And I actually, I'm looking forward to subsequent meetings where this is an effort that's going to require a sustained effort over a sustained period of time by a large group of partners and industry academia and the government. And we look forward to taking up this challenge and working on it with you all. So thanks for being with us on this Friday. Enjoy your weekends.