A silicon wafer reflecting Subramanian Iyer, a specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a technology called advanced chip packaging. Credit.
Photographs by Gabriela Bhaskar Reporting from San Francisco Subramanian Iyer, an electrical engineer and educator, has long specialized in a sleepy niche of the semiconductor industry that has now become a major choke point in the global contest for artificial intelligence leadership.
That niche is a technology called advanced chip packaging, which bundles as many as dozens of the components in palm-size modules.
As computing gains from the traditional practice of shrinking transistors to pack more of them onto each chip have diminished, Nvidia and other chip giants have turned to packaging as an essential way to deliver semiconductors capable of more complex tasks for A. I. Dr.
Iyer, 72, a former IBM technologist and now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has helped drive packaging advances over decades. But he and chip industry executives have watched in alarm as U. S.
leadership in the field has slipped away to the same company that dominates advanced chip manufacturing. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes cutting-edge chips for Nvidia and other A. I. leaders, also packages nearly all of them.
Its key suppliers and partners are mainly in Taiwan, too, facing the same threat from China that caused U. S. policymakers to funnel billions of dollars into boosting domestic chip fabrication.
The packaging bottleneck has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley as TSMC has struggled to keep up with demand. Dr. Iyer tried to help by developing plans for a packaging research and development center, funded with $1.
1 billion from the Biden administration and slated to be built in Arizona, but the Trump administration effectively killed the effort last year. “The bottom line is they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” Dr. Iyer said.
“We’ve ended up in a place where we are even more dependent on TSMC. ” We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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