Investing in US memory chip R&D will secure American innovation for years (Guest Opinion by Doug Grose)
Doug Grose is former CEO of GlobalFoundries and current chair of NY CREATES — a world-leading semiconductor R&D and innovation hub in Albany, the heart of New York’s Tech Valley.
Imagine if every picture you snapped on your phone and every document you typed up disappeared within seconds rather than being stored for future use. The electronic devices you rely on every day would have almost no value. Yet, thanks to a type of computer chip called memory, people can access and organize real-time data with their PCs, tablets, smart-TVs, cars — the list goes on.
As a longtime executive at IBM and the former CEO of GlobalFoundries, I have spent decades in the semiconductor industry advocating for America’s technology leadership. As a veteran of the industry, I want to share why establishing a Memory Technical Center is critical to maintaining our position as a global leader in innovation.
Memory is at the center of advanced computing, powering AI, supercomputers and robots. But while much of the discussion about semiconductors in Washington focuses on developments in leading-edge logic chips, innovative designs for memory chips will be every bit as important to America’s future.
Over the past year, the U.S. government has announced billions of dollars in grants from the CHIPS & Science Act to help build chip factories in the United States. Now, the government is focusing on semiconductor R&D programs to help keep our technological edge in the future through initiatives like the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC).
Creating a Memory Technical Center to advance memory research as a core part of the NSTC’s R&D efforts will help ensure America leads in this critical part of the semiconductor industry. Global competitors are investing billions in memory research to overtake our technology, and the U.S. needs to maintain its R&D advantage. The center would bolster America’s economy with jobs not just at memory companies but also at university labs, advanced materials suppliers, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment makers.
The explosion in the amount of data, and more importantly, the insight that can be gained from that data today has culminated in an inflection point where fast movement and efficient management of data is essential to future technologies such as autonomous driving and next-gen AI models. As it becomes more difficult for incumbent computer systems to improve speed and energy efficiency, developing memory-centric approaches might, among other things, enable autonomous vehicles to perform the simultaneous tasks needed to keep passengers safe. These memory-centric approaches can be the difference between future technologies coming to life versus never seeing the light of day.
The importance of increasing efficiency cannot be understated. To keep pace with the world’s energy demands and to protect our natural resources, it’s imperative we make these technologies more energy efficient. Innovations in memory increase speed and dramatically reduce the high energy cost of data movement.
Bringing together the tools and expertise required for this kind of technology development costs billions of dollars. The CHIPS program doesn’t have the capacity to do this from scratch and will require leveraging industry expertise, the right stakeholders and adequate resources. Global leading-edge R&D on memory is already happening in Idaho. Idaho’s extraordinary semiconductor ecosystem boasts six times the national rate of semiconductor jobs and has over 7,000 jobs in the industry, making Boise an ideal location for a Memory Technical Center. Micron has also announced a $100 billion investment in New York state to continue its manufacturing of leading-edge memory chips and leverage NY CREATES’ Albany Nanotech Complex to access highly-advanced semiconductor lithography tools established with a $10 billion investment. The learning gained from this Center will complement R&D efforts at a Memory Technical Center and advance memory-centric technology. Thanks to ongoing efforts in Boise and Albany, the U.S. is not only leading the way in memory research, but is also enabling domestic industry leadership and America’s global competitiveness.
A Memory Technical Center will create a monumental opportunity to revolutionize memory technology through collaborative relationships between industry, startups, professors and the U.S. government. We should harness the infrastructure and brainpower in Boise — amplifying the impact of leading-edge labs, equipment and resources in the region to help researchers from across our country carry the torch of memory innovation. An effective public-private partnership will keep America ahead of our global competitors providing generations of U.S. semiconductor leadership.
Things once considered science fiction are made possible today by memory technology. The invention of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) laid the foundation of the personal computing revolution in the 1970s. The invention of NAND, or flash memory, laid the foundation for the iPhone and mobile computing in the 2000s. Now, high bandwidth memory (HBM) is laying the foundation for AI. A Memory Technical Center will propel the powerful innovation happening in the U.S. for tomorrow’s solutions.