edfas.org ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 27 NO. 2 2 One of the lasting legacies of the 2020 COVID-19 crisis was the economic impact, still felt nearly three years after the general recovery. The semiconductor industry as a whole registered some of the greatest restart issues. Severe supply chain disruptions became the limiting factor in the production of everything from automobiles to home appliances to computers, and even defense and general infrastructure items. The pundits blamed it largely on the complexity of fab restart and workforce issues, but these only account for part of the delayed recovery and continued shortfall in select products. Increased component complexity, rapidly shifting demand profiles, and capacity constraints in a number of niche and leading-edge technologies were not immediately recognized or fully understood by outside observers. COVID was a convenient trigger for an industry primed for problems, as many of the underlying factors were 15 years or more in the making. For example, regular progression in wafer size came to an end with 300 mm. The fabless model continued to gain momentum, but foundry capacity, largely centered in Asia, failed to keep pace. At the ultra-high end, only a handful of manufacturers made it to FinFETs, and only TSMC, Samsung, and a struggling Intel are likely to go beyond to gate-all-around. The cost of extreme ultraviolet lithography for sub 7 nm has pushed the cost of new fabs beyond $20 billion USD, simply too much for most players. And the lure of higher end technologies and the subsequent abandonment of certain legacy products has caused shortages of essential, but “unglamorous” components. While the U.S. still retains leadership in microchip design, domestic chip manufacturing dropped to an all-time low of around 11% of worldwide demand. Package substrate manufacturing and assembly hovers near zero. By comparison, the U.S. supplied close to 40% of silicon in 1990 and considerably more in the decades prior. The Defense Department, Intelligence and Commerce, among others, became increasingly concerned about essential high-end chips produced overseas, the possible impact on national security, and overall economic competitiveness. Several individual U.S. states saw the growing problem and led by example ahead of federal action, providing proof that government/industrial cooperation does work. New York incentives landed SEMATECH and GlobalFoundries (GFS), and talks with Micron and Wolfspeed followed. Texas locked in Samsung, Arizona signed the first of several TSMC fabs, and Ohio was in talks with Intel. The CHIPS Act ($52B in contract grants), part of the larger $280B bipartisan CHIPS and Science bill, was finally signed into law on August 9, 2022, to operate MAY 2025 | VOLUME 27 | ISSUE 2 A RESOURCE FOR TECHNICAL INFORMATION AND INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENTS ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS GUEST EDITORIAL THE CHIPS ACT AND ITS IMPACT ON THE SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY AND ANALYTICAL LABS Steve Herschbein, retired IBM/GFS steven.herschbein@gmail.com edfas.org (continued on page 25) PURPOSE: To provide a technical condensation of information of interest to electronic device failure analysis technicians, engineers, and managers. Nicholas Antoniou Editor/KLA nicholas.antoniou@kla.com Joanne Miller Senior Editor Victoria Burt Managing Editor Allison Freeman Production Supervisor ASSOCIATE EDITORS Navid Asadi University of Florida Guillaume Bascoul CNES France Felix Beaudoin GlobalFoundries Michael R. Bruce Consultant Jiann Min Chin Advanced Micro Devices Singapore Michael DiBattista Varioscale Inc. Rosine Coq Germanicus Universitié de Caen Normandie Szu Huat Goh Qualcomm Jason Holm NIST Ted Kolasa Northrop Grumman Space Systems Joy Liao Nvidia Corp. Rosalinda M. Ring NenoVision Tom Schamp E-Space David Su Yi-Xiang Investment Co. Martin Versen University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim, Germany FOUNDING EDITORS Edward I. Cole, Jr. Sandia National Labs Lawrence C. Wagner LWSN Consulting Inc. GRAPHIC DESIGN Jan Nejedlik, jan@designbyj.com PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSIONS magazines@asminternational.org Electronic Device Failure Analysis™ (ISSN 1537-0755) is published quarterly by ASM International®, 9639 Kinsman Road, Materials Park, OH 44073; tel: 800.336.5152; website: edfas. org. Copyright © 2025 by ASM International. Receive Electronic Device Failure Analysis as part of your EDFAS membership. Non-member subscription rate is $175 U.S. per year. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by ASM International for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service, provided that the base fee of $19 per article is paid directly to CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Electronic Device Failure Analysis is indexed or abstracted by Compendex, EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest. Herschbein
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