The University of Vermont unveiled a new campus semiconductor laboratory Thursday, a high-tech facility intended to help students join a crucial and growing industry.
The laboratory, known as the Device Characterization Lab, allows students to analyze and observe the properties of semiconductors. It is supported by a $2.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
“What we are trying to do today, and what (we) were trying to do for the last four years, is to create an ethos where we have a constant exchange of people, ideas, initiatives and urgency to the things that we can do together for Vermont,” said Kirk Dombrowski, the university’s vice president for research, at a ribbon-cutting event Thursday morning.
Semiconductors, a term sometimes used to refer to microchips, make up a key building block of modern electronic devices. Smartphones, computers and many other devices would not be able to function without them.
Manufacturing and analyzing the devices requires high-tech facilities and equipment that undergraduates rarely have access to, university officials said. But GlobalFoundries, which operates a chip-making plant in Essex Junction, has donated hardware — such as “probers and parameter analyzers,” according to a UVM press release — to give students training opportunities.
This fall, the university launched an undergraduate certificate program in Semiconductor Engineering and Physics, and UVM plans to introduce a graduate-level certificate program starting next fall.
“The semiconductor initiative here is really integrated in both research and education,” said Matthew White, a physics professor, on a tour of the semiconductor laboratory facilities. “This is a research lab, but we have a lot of undergraduate students, a lot of graduate students working in here, training, learning skills. Most of my students, if they don’t go on to graduate schools or postdocs, they will go into the semiconductor industry.”
Thursday’s ribbon-cutting comes as Washington has poured billions into developing the domestic semiconductor industry, which federal officials see as crucial to American technological superiority.
Last year, President Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS Act, which is expected to pour roughly $280 billion into American semiconductor research and manufacturing.
On Wednesday, GlobalFoundries announced that it had received $35 million in funding from the Pentagon to produce gallium nitride chips at its Essex Junction plant. The company received another $30 million in federal dollars last year.
Correction: In a previous version of this story, Matt Gallagher was misidentified in two photo captions.
