Chipshub wins NSF award for Chip Design Hub to help ease urgent national semiconductor workforce shortage
Addressing a crucial national need and marking a major advance for Purdue University’s semiconductor leadership, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Purdue Engineering-led Chipshub as its Chip Design Hub.
The NSF will provide $7 million over five years to enable Chipshub — a 2-year-old open and free online platform powered by the groundbreaking nanoHUB — to significantly expand its scope and scale to cover the entire chip design process and to support teaching and research in far more higher education institutions.
“This award is momentous for Purdue and our nation,” said Gerhard Klimeck, nanoHUB co-director, Chip Design Hub principal investigator, Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Riley Director of the Center for Predictive Devices and Materials and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
Such awards support the expansion of domestic talent pipelines, chip design ecosystems and industrial innovation to return semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S.
The challenge
“Our country faces a shortage of approximately 67,000 semiconductor engineers, technicians and computer scientists by 2030,” Klimeck said, citing a Semiconductor Industry Association/Oxford Economics report.
“A Purdue market analysis shows that U.S. teaching and research in chip design reach only about 10% of technical universities, while already reaching 86% tier R1 universities,” said Alejandro Strachan, nanoHUB and Chipshub co-director and Reilly Professor of Materials Engineering at Purdue. “Even doubling or tripling the number of students taught in semiconductors at these universities will not close the gap in the required workforce. Clearly, chip design must be taught and used in research in a much larger number of universities.”
The solution
As the nation’s leading semiconductor university, Purdue is highly qualified to help meet the challenge based on its federally funded research and workforce development work in this area.
Over 21 years (2002-2023), the NSF has invested almost $64 million in nanoHUB as it would fund an engineering research center, while Purdue has supported nanoHUB with nearly $20 million. Three large-scale workforce development efforts — Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement (SCALE), Microelectronics Security Training (MEST), and Silicon Crossroads, which is funded by the Department of Defense’s Microelectronic Commons programs — have collaborated and embraced nanoHUB technology and the need for a national infrastructure. Chipshub will also be a powerful talent and skill generator for companies choosing to come to the Purdue ecosystem, like Mediatek and SK hynix. “Their ongoing support has enabled the continued operation of nanoHUB, expansion of services, and the initial development of Chipshub,” Strachan said.
With government, academic and industry cooperation, nanoHUB has grown steadily as the first scientific end-to-end cloud computing environment; invented scientific apps to complex simulation tools (predating iPhone apps by two years); and helped 889 universities (43% of U.S. technical universities) change their nanotechnology, semiconductors and materials curricula. Over 200,000 nanoHUB users have run physics-based simulations in more than 800 apps and tools. The resource requirements for these simulations range widely from seconds on a single computer core to many hours on a parallel supercomputer, all delivered transparently to the end user.
The plan
“The new NSF funding will enable us to build upon the Chipshub prototype and develop a whole pipeline from chip design (class) to fab (tape-out with real chips) to lab (for post-fab testing), supported by many fully tested example workflows,” Klimeck said.
In the past 12 months, Chipshub already has served more than 200 unique users with electronic design automation (EDA) chip design software, representing 22 universities, 10 corporations and two government entities. Users have included students in the SCALE and Summer Training, Awareness, and Readiness for Semiconductors (STARS) programs at Purdue. Four universities — Purdue, Arizona State University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and Portland State University —already have conducted formal classes in Chipshub.
The five-year goal is to expand academic classroom use to 100 universities, with the NSF Chip Design Hub open to all U.S. institutions of higher learning. Klimeck said Purdue’s market analysis indicates that, pending additional resources, there is a potential to reach at least 900 universities who are likely also interested in aspects of chip design and semiconductors in general.
The newly designated NSF Chip Design Hub will continue to install, deploy for access, and support electronic design automation (EDA) tools for the semiconductor community and reduce barriers for entry, and the hub’s academic team will develop curricula for universities. Prominent EDA vendors, such as Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, Keysight, Ansys and Luceda, have committed to supply free licenses to enable any U.S. higher education institution to perform chip design on Chipshub.
The Chip Design Hub will support “Faculty Fellows” who are already teaching chip design at R1, R2, and four-year universities to deliver their end-to-end educational materials into Chipshub, to use Chipshub for their own teaching, and then participate in teach-the-teacher workshops to enable other faculty to adopt the new teaching materials on Chipshub. The Faculty Fellows will serve as Chipshub ambassadors to the whole community. “The human component of community building is even more critical than the ability to deliver simulation tools” Strachan said.
The NSF is also supporting a new initiative led by the University of Chicago — the Advanced Chip Design Enablement Hub: ACE-3D. This hub will advance training and deployment of next-generation 3D chip packaging technologies, with a focus on enabling real-world applications and accelerating innovation across academic research and domestic manufacturing. Led by Farah Fahim, a UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering CASE senior scientist and Microelectronics Division Director at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. ACE-3D aims to build a vibrant 3D chip design community to drive U.S. leadership in semiconductor technology which will deploy its educational and research content on Purdue’s Chipshub.