The Department of Defense (DoD) on Sept. 20 announced its first set of awards under the CHIPS Act totaling $240 million to establish eight microelectronics commons innovation hubs.
The Pentagon also warned, however, that a looming government shutdown could bring progress on that initiative to a halt.
The Microelectronics Commons program – born out of the CHIPS and Science Act – aims to use these innovation hubs to accelerate domestic hardware prototyping and “accelerating the lab-to-fab transition, that infamous valley of death between [research and development] and production,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in a statement.
Each hub will receive between $15 million and $40 million of funding, depending on their needs and the existing resources they’ll leverage, Hicks said.
The hubs will focus on areas like electromagnetic warfare, secure computing at the tactical edge, the Internet of Things, AI hardware, 5G and 6G wireless, quantum, and other emerging technologies.
Since last December, the department received 83 proposals for potential hubs and gathered over 50 experts from DoD and the Department of Commerce, the Department of State, and the Department of Energy to evaluate the proposals.
The eight hubs are:
- Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub;
- Silicon Crossroads Microelectronics Commons Hub;
- California Defense Ready Electronics and Microdevices Superhub Hub;
- Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors Hub;
- Southwest Advanced Prototyping Hub;
- Midwest Microelectronics Consortium Hub;
- Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub; and
- California-Pacific-Northwest AI Hardware Hub.
DoD will host its first Microelectronics Commons annual meeting next month, where officials will hear directly from the tech hubs. Hicks reiterated that today’s awards are just one piece of the CHIPS Act.
This is the largest award to date under President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act. The CHIPS Act allocated approximately $2 billion for DoD microelectronics production and the Microelectronics Commons.
“President Biden’s CHIPS Act will supercharge America’s ability to prototype, manufacture, and produce microelectronics scale. CHIPS and Science made clear to America — and the world — that the U.S. government is committed to ensuring that our industrial and scientific powerhouses can deliver what we need to secure our future in this era of strategic competition,” Hicks said.
The DoD’s announcement comes just one day after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that a possible government shutdown would bring any progress made, including in microelectronics, to a grinding halt.
“When I talk to members of Congress, they say, ‘How come you are not moving faster on CHIPS? Where’s this? Where’s that?’ We are literally working seven days a week to go as fast as we can … If there is a shutdown, it’ll come to a grinding halt,” Raimondo said, during a September 19 House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hearing.
