Community Response to RFI on Incentives, Infrastructure, and Research and Development Needs To Support a Strong Domestic Semiconductor Industry
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) with input from CRA-Industry recently responded to the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Request for Information on Incentives, Infrastructure, and Research and Development Needs to Support a Strong Domestic Semiconductor Industry. The RFI was seeking information in order to inform the planning and design of potential programs to: Incentivize investment in semiconductor manufacturing facilities and associated ecosystems; provide for shared infrastructure to accelerate semiconductor research, development, and prototyping; and support research related to advanced packaging and advanced metrology to ensure a robust domestic semiconductor industry.
This response was written by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Ian Foster (University of Chicago), William Gropp (University of Illinois), Brian LaMacchia (Microsoft Research), Vivek Sarkar (Georgia Tech), and Cliff Young (Google).
This report emphasizes that computing applications should have an equal part in influencing decisions about semiconductor technology and investment with a particular focus on the need to achieve this balance in implementation of the Semiconductor Financial Assistance Program, (Section 9902 of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021). They focus on driving applications in computing, broadly, as the areas of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, experimental scientific computing, and security. The authors address this need in the context of the National Semiconductor Technology Center. In addition, the response provides input on fostering collaboration and dealing with intellectual property.
The response effort was led by the CCC’s Weird Ways to Compute Task Force that focuses on activities related to the development of future computing architecture and systems, in order to achieve major goals such as overcoming the end of Moore’s Law and improving high performance computing systems.
Read the full report here.
