The National Science Foundation has awarded $7 million to Purdue University to expand its Chipshub semiconductor teaching and research initiative to more higher education institutions.
The five-year commitment aims to help fill a workforce gap in the semiconductor industry nationwide, the university said.
“This award is momentous for Purdue and our nation,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who also serves as director of the university’s Center for Predictive Devices and Materials and its Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
Chipshub debuted in 2023 as an online platform for semiconductor simulations, software, collaboration and workforce development. A collaboration among the university, the state of Indiana, the U.S. Department of Defense and international research and development center Imec, Chipshub is an offshoot of Purdue’s NanoHUB, a cloud-based provider of simulation tools. More than 1 million visitors across 172 countries accessed the hub annually after it, too, launched in 2023.
When Chipshub launched, it was expected to help more than 200,000 U.S. engineering students and about 50,000 designers over the next five years.
The National Science Foundation award is expected to widen that reach by building upon the Chipshub prototype. The five-year goal is to expand academic classroom use to 100 universities and support “Faculty Fellows” who already teach chip design so that they can contribute their educational materials to the effort.
In the past 12 months, Chipshub has served more than 200 unique users with electronic design automation chip design software, representing 22 universities, 10 corporations and two government entities, Purdue said in a news release
A Purdue market analysis indicates that while U.S. teaching and research in chip design reaches nearly 9 out of 10 tier R1 research universities, only about 10% of technical universities benefit.
“Clearly,” NanoHUB and Chipshub Co-director Alejandro Strachan said in the release, “chip design must be taught and used in research in a much larger number of universities.”