One of a semiconductor industry’s trade groups on Wednesday called leaders of the U.S. government on to increase the funding for research related to chip making and science education along with the relaxation on green cards to better counter the investments by China in chip technology.
The Semiconductor Association, having firms like Nvidia Corp, Micron Technology and Intel Corp as its members, asked U.S. officials to increase the current federal funding of $1.5 billion to $5 billion over next five years for chip research and make the funding two folds for research in chip related fields like material science.
The group, in order to recruit related skilled workforce, is also seeking changes that could be helping the companies to do so and proposed short term and long term strategy for the same.
Through short term strategy, it is desirous to make the immigration process easy for the skilled workers needed by the chip making industry from countries like India and China to obtain permanent U.S. residency while long term strategy emphasized on doubling the number of science and engineering graduates in the United States by 2029, by increasing the spending on science education.
Both the efforts suggested by the group will eventually be mutually supporting the one another because boosted funding for research work to be done in U.S. national labs, universities and companies will be creating more jobs for the new graduates, which will feed the talent-hungry pipeline of graduates needed by the industry to remain competitive globally, Micron’s Chief Executive and current chair of the trade group Sanjay Mehrotra told Reuters.
Chip industry in China has been thriving because of the heavy funding by the government for the advancement of technology along with related fields like AI, and in order to counter China’s chip industry which has been rising quickly, the U.S. semiconductor group is asking to rise the funding.
