The federal CHIPS for America program has released info about a new funding round of up to $1.6 billion, focused on bolstering advanced semiconductor packaging manufacturing in the United States.
The funding will be focused in five related research and development areas: Equipment, tools, processes and process integration; power delivery and thermal management; connector technologies, including radio frequency (RF) and photonics; the chiplets ecosystem; and co-design or electronic design automation (EDA). The notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is also expected to include funding for some prototype development. The CHIPS for America program is expected to make multiple awards of about $150 million in federal funding, to be paired with private sector investments.
This funding is coming through the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP), which is one of four chip R&D-focused programs within the overall $50 billion CHIPS for America effort.
In this case, “advanced packaging” is considered to encompass chips that that are assembled tightly on a substrate in two or three dimensions, with extremely fine dimensions, according to the Department of Commerce—which called advanced packaging a “transformative capability” that nonetheless has “many technological challenges to solve” and includes, for example, high-performance chips for AI but also things like low-power electronics.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said that advanced packaging is a “huge part” of having a “vibrant domestic semiconductor ecosystem.” According to the CHIPS for America’s description of the NAPMP, advanced packaging capacity and R&D “has never been in higher demand or more important to advances in semiconductor technology,” and the related technologies enable improvements in system performance, function and time to market, as well as the ability to make smaller, cheaper and more power-efficient chips. “Achieving these goals requires coordinated investments to support integrated R&D activities to establish leading-edge domestic capacity for semiconductor advanced packaging,” according to the program website.
The NAPMP “will enable a packaging sector within the United States that outpaces the world through innovation driven by robust R&D,” said Laurie Locascio, Under Secretary of Commerce for standards and technology and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Within a decade, through R&D funded by CHIPS for America, we will create a domestic packaging industry where advanced node chips manufactured in the U.S. and abroad can be packaged within the United States and where innovative designs and architectures are enabled through leading-edge packaging capabilities.”
