Some of the top defense technology officials in the U.S. came to Arizona State University recently to hear about the progress of the new Southwest Accelerated Prototyping Hub, led by ASU.
The hub, designed to jump-start microelectronics projects funded by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, is a collaboration that has grown to more than 130 leading corporate, startup, academic and national lab partners from the semiconductor and defense sectors in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and beyond.
The goal is to speed the time it takes to transform lab ideas into practical solutions for the Department of Defense.
In September, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that the SWAP Hub would receive nearly $40 million in funding this year as one of eight “Microelectronics Commons” regional innovation hubs. The SWAP Hub is part of the Microelectronics Commons, a $1.63 billion Department of Defense network of eight regional hubs funded by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.
Their trip to ASU was part of a national tour to visit each of the regional hubs and encourage engagement in project proposals, which are due at the end of February.
Devanand Shenoy, who is leading the Department of Defense’s research and engineering efforts in microelectronics, and several other DoD officials met with members of the hub at SkySong, The ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center. The visit was part of a three-week tour of all eight hubs by the DoD team.
“The CHIPS Act has given us a unique opportunity to really refocus a whole-of-nation effort on solving problems related to semiconductor manufacturing. We want to onshore more manufacturing and ‘friendshore’ more manufacturing to make sure that we’ve stabilized the supply chain for semiconductors,” said Liesl Folks, vice president for semiconductor strategy at the University of Arizona, a SWAP Hub partner.
The huge Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility being built in north Phoenix represents a major public and private investment in relocating some of that manufacturing back to the U.S.
But the “lab-to-fab” gap must be bridged and innovations must be scaled up to support national security.
“One of the challenges that the United States has is we have the world’s biggest, largest, best innovation engine. And we have this gap of getting that innovation to manufacturing and then to production, hence the lab-to-fab gap,” said Ken Potts, senior director of government programs at Synopsys, a SWAP Hub partner.
Shenoy and his team heard about several SWAP Hub successes so far, including increasing the number of partners from about 60 last year to more than 130 now, with about 20 more partners pending. About 50 of the partners are small businesses.
“One of the core challenges in ‘lab-to-fab’ is that small businesses have no means to prototype. The hub will enable that,” said Krishnendu Chakrabarty, chief technology officer of the hub and Fulton Professor of Microelectronics in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering.
Tim Olson, CEO of Deca Technologies, a SWAP Hub partner, said that the SWAP Hub is a game changer compared to when he founded his company decades ago.
“One problem we had is we had a great idea but we had to find $100 million to prove the idea and if we had had a SWAP Hub, we could have proved it for free, or a lot less,” he said during a panel discussion at the daylong event.
“It lowers the barrier to entry. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
