New Challenges for U.S. Semiconductor Industry

摘要

The United States faces a growing threat to its leadership of the world semiconductor industry. A combination of market forces and foreign industrial policies is creating powerful incentives to shift new chip production offshore. If this trend continues, the U.S. lead in chip manufacturing, equipment, and design may well erode, with important and unoleasant conseauences for U.S. productivity growth and, ultimately, the country's economic and military security. To address this challenge, U.S. industry and the government need to cooperate to determine their response. As challenges tied to the industry's move toward ever-smaller dimensions have intensified, governments in Asia and Europe have moved vigorously to coordinate and fund research in both product and process technologies. The scale of these efforts is unprecedented. A recent U.S. National Research Council report, Securing the Future, identified 16 major government-sponsored initiatives at the national and regional [i.e., Eu-ropean Union (EU)] level, a number of them receiving more than $100 million annually in support. Some have been inspired by the success of SEMATECH, the formerly U.S.-only consortium of semiconductor device makers widely credited with helping to pull the U.S. industry out of its tailspin in the late 1980s. What is odd is mat although governments abroad have embraced consortia modeled on SEMATECH as a means of supporting national and regional industries, today the United States has no comparable publicly supported effort, even as the technological hurdles faced by this enabling industry continue to grow.