How ASU is helping State Department secure global supply of microchips
The COVID-19 pandemic showed what can happen to many industries when supply chains aren’t ready for disruptions. The State Department wants to make sure the global semiconductor industry can withstand shocks and has tapped Arizona State University for help.
The department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs late last month awarded its first such university contract, worth $13.8 million, to ASU and its Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering to help evaluate the semiconductor supply chains of several key foreign trading partners and allies.
The CHIPS Act of 2022 focused largely on developing and expanding the nation’s ability to manufacture advanced semiconductors, which are now found in a range of applications from vehicles to smartphones, medical devices to computers.
A much smaller and less visible State Department program aims to strengthen semiconductor supply chains in five important but largely underdeveloped foreign trade partners: Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Costa Rica and Panama.
One focus will be on how companies in these countries assemble, test and package semiconductors, with packaging centered around protecting chips in casings and connecting them to other components.
“We want to make sure we have more resilience to shocks of the kind we observed in the COVID pandemic,” said Ramin Toloui, the State Department assistant secretary who runs the program. “This will only become more important as the role of semiconductors continues to grow.”
ASU lands first university contract
Toloui, who met March 7 on ASU’s Tempe campus with a small number of semiconductor company representatives, said it is in America’s best interest to make sure trading-partner allies build up their supply-chain resilience in various ways, including workforce development, electrical infrastructure and modernized regulations. After officials in the five nations evaluate their supply chains, ASU experts will help them fix shortcomings.
“We’re drawing on ASU’s extraordinary expertise in the semiconductor ecosystem,” Toloui said.
Semiconductor supply chains are so interwoven that disruptions in one country can cause problems elsewhere.
For example, he said pandemic delays that reduced semiconductor imports from Asia slowed assembly lines at U.S. automakers.
Toloui said the State Department views those five foreign trading partners as having “great potential” for the semiconductor industry, although they contribute much less than other countries including Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan.
Even though the key thrust of the CHIPS Act is to revive chip manufacturing in America, the federal government “believes it is critical for our partners and allies to work together to diversify critical supply chains and collaborate on technologies of the future to support our shared economic growth, security and democratic values,” Toloui said.
“No one country, including the United States, can produce or onshore everything it needs to manufacture semiconductors.”