As ever more technologies — including advanced batteries, computers and artificial-intelligence tools — enter our lives, increasing numbers of highly skilled workers are needed to build them. Universities can provide training. But they are struggling to keep up with surging demand.
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Take semiconductors. From integrated circuits to microsensors, chips shape our lives. For decades, through cooperation and coordinated planning, the chip industry has triumphed over technical challenges to make transistors ever smaller. Today, it faces a fresh scaling challenge that it seems unable to overcome: an unprecedented global shortage in workforce training and talent.
In the United Kingdom, 63% of semiconductor manufacturers are facing a worker shortfall (see go.nature.com/4mqea8e). By 2030, the US semiconductor sector is projected to have a 58% shortage in its workforce (see go.nature.com/4nkwzqz). The European Union faces a similar crisis: the sector is expected to have some 75,000 unfilled positions by 2030 (see go.nature.com/4nckwir). And in Asia, the industry’s epicentre, South Korea expects to have shortages of at least 30,000 people over the next decade.
This skills chasm threatens countries’ plans to build semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure, with broad implications. Defence technologies rely on sophisticated chips; semiconductor security is linked to national cybersecurity; and supply-chain issues can disrupt entire economies. And there is a crucial problem: sophisticated technologies require complex manufacturing processes, making them vulnerable to training shortfalls.
People who produce high-end semiconductors need to know how to work in a specialized semiconductor-fabrication facility, or ‘fab’ — a tightly controlled and isolated environment designed to minimize contamination by airborne particles. China’s nascent semiconductor industry has, so far, focused on simpler ‘fabless’ chips. But to produce high-end chips, the nation will need highly proficient workers.
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The US semiconductor industry has a development plan, which includes feel-good strategies for ‘winning hearts and minds’ — such as providing career ambassadors and webinars. The United Kingdom has proposed similar outreach campaigns. Attracting talent is important, but what’s next? These plans fail to acknowledge the true cost of a highly specialized, highly technical education.
I teach courses on micro- and nanofabrication at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, which operates a state-of-the art clean room (Nanofab) and electron-microscopy and surface-analysis laboratory. The university showcases the types of initiative needed to develop people’s skills. We have established industry–academic partnerships through the Utah Network for Integrated Computing and Semiconductor Research and Education. We offer free clean-room training courses for technicians and have obtained industrial support for class fees. But we experience many challenges.
Academic clean rooms at public institutions operate at the mercy of university administrators and state legislators. Tool costs are high. An electron-beam lithography system, for example, costs more than US$1 million to buy and $100,000 per year to maintain. Most university clean rooms encourage start-up and tech companies to pay for part-time use of the facilities to offset such expenses.
