Last week, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo gave a speech laying out what she called a “long-term vision for America’s technological leadership.” At the center of the effort was the CHIPS Act passed last year to encourage semiconductor manufacturing here in the U.S.
But well before the applications opened this week for chipmakers to seek a portion of the $39 billion in funding allotted to ramp up manufacturing here, states including Arizona, Ohio and New York were already lining up projects. There’s no reason that Massachusetts, the state where the first minicomputers were created in the 1960s, and which has been a technological powerhouse for decades, shouldn’t be doing the same — and being more open and transparent about efforts that are being made.
It’s pretty obvious why the federal government is interested in ensuring that we’re not as reliant on China, South Korea and Taiwan for semiconductor chips as more of the appliances we use every day depend on them. Aside from national security concerns, the pandemic underscored the problems that can arise when there are disruptions in such a lengthy supply chain. But for the state of Massachusetts, our goal is clear: We should be able to get one of the two “large-scale clusters of leading-edge logic fabs,” as Raimondo described it, that are intended to be built as a result of the CHIPS Act.
“Each cluster will include a robust supplier ecosystem, R&D facilities to continuously innovate new process technologies, and...
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