The latest US CHIPS Act proposed grant focuses on digital twin technology, an older scheme that has seen renewed value with the advent of accelerator chips like Nvidia’s Blackwell and AMD’s MI350 series.
Commerce Department officials on Tuesday announced a proposed grant of $285 to the Semiconductor Research Corp. consortium to establish a CHIPS Manufacturing USA institute in Durham, NC. While the grant is much smaller than the billions proposed or finalized for major chip fabs like Intel and TSMC, it will be combined with funding totaling $1 billion, CHIPS for America announced.
The new institute will be called SMART USA to focus on development and use of digital twins to improved domestic designs for semiconductors as well as advanced packaging, assembly and testing processes. It will join a network of 17 existing institutes focused on a robust electronics R&D infrastructure.
Digital twins are virtual models that often replicate physical objects, including chips or machines or buildings, which can be used to design or test processes and applications before they are used in real life. Major corporations also are using them for many other purposes, including predictions about weather systems and pharmaceutical composition, sometimes relying on artificial data enabled by AI to fill in unknowns in the real-world data to test out scenarios. Nvidia in March announced the Earth-2 platform to analyze weather patterns and climates by creating a virtual representation of the Earth to allow for detailed simulations and predictions of weather events. The Earth-2 platform is part of Nvidia’s CUDA-X microservices.
“With new digital twin capabilities, America is fostering unparalleled opportunities to collaborate with experts and researchers anywhere in the world to develop the next frontier of technological advancements in the semiconductor industry,” said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in a statement.
SMART USA set several goals over the next five years including reduction US chip development and manufacturing costs by 35% and reducing cycle times by 30% with a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions associated with chip manufacturing.
CHIPS for America has announced 22 recipients of proposed grants that total $36 billion of the $39 billion reserved for grants in the $52 billion original CHIPS and Science Act that became law in 2022 with bipartisan support. Of those 22, the program recently announced final agreements with TSMC and Polar Semiconductor and is working to finish finalizing awards prior to Jan. 20 when President-elect Donald Trump assumes his second term.
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