Sure, chips may always be getting smarter, their power doubling every 18 months, according to Moore's Law. That doesn't mean chips will never face a roadblock in their path of progress. Which is why the Semiconductor Industry Association, hand-in-hand with the federal government, is out to bolster academic research into clearing the long-term obstacles facing chipmakers.
"The thrust of the program is funding research efforts that are not going to happen unless we fund them," said Jeff Weir, spokesman for the Semiconductor Industry Association.
The industry and government association is spearheading the new micro-electronics Focus Center Research Program. Its purpose is to take aim at the most challenging technological problems that may dampen the ability to cram more transistors -- the building blocks of chip power -- onto a single silicon wafer.
With the long-term health of the industry in mind, the project was seeded to determine "what needs to be done to keep the industry going," Weir said. Research coming out of the effort, still not specified, will generally be looking for new methodologies in designing, testing, and connecting microchip components.
To the US semiconductor industry, it represents the most ambitious research project since Sematech was formed in 1987. Sematech is a consortium of US chip manufacturers working to keep the United States in the silicon lead.
Ron Dornseif, principal analyst with Dataquest, likes the look of the Focus Center plan. "It's following a model that has been very successful, namely the Sematech model," he said. "I expect to see some good work that comes out of it."
Specifically, he said the issues that the project has identified are increasingly important. "The interconnect issues are becoming increasingly [important]," he said. "There are not a lot of design tools that allow efficient laying out of the circuits."
The funding will come from the member companies of the Semiconductor Industry Association, Sematech, another industry consortium called SEMI, and the US Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. The industry is funding 75 percent, and 25 percent is provided by the government.
The Focus Center Research Program is currently working out a contract with university consortia, led by the University of California at Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology, that will initially fund the schools with an amount likely to be around $10 million, Weir said.
Within a few years, the program hopes to be funding semiconductor research at a $60 million annual level.
Though 10 percent of a chipmaker's annual budget is devoted to research and design, Weir said the companies are forced to focus on the shorter term.
An example of one future area of research is in new forms of the lithographic process, in which circuits are printed on chips. Rather than the etching process, companies like IBM and Lucent are looking into ultraviolet-based and X-ray-based lithography.
While some areas of new lithography research may be well-funded today, the Focus Centers will determine where the missing parts may be in this and other areas of design and manufacturing.
"We're not trying to duplicate the effort of others here," Weir said. "We want to go somewhere else. It's designed to fill research needs and gaps."
After the first two centers, the plan calls for four additional focus centers nationwide, heading up the research programs of a multi-university network. The money will go to salaries for students and faculty and payment for equipment and facilities.
"If the chip industry is healthy and vibrant and still making products people want in 10 years," Weir said, "a lot of it will be because it made the right research decisions" today.
