How the CHIPS Act is shaping education in Boise

Photo by Kaeden Lincoln

The CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) Act of 2022, when signed into law by President Joe Biden, brought forth a flood of funding for semiconductor manufacture and its adjacent infrastructure. Part of the effort to Create Helpful Incentives for Producing Semiconductors included breaking ground on massive Micron fabrication facilities (fabs), creating tens of thousands of jobs in the process.

The CHIPS and Science Act prompted a new sister city relationship with Syracuse, New York. The findings in that article illustrated the effects in Syracuse — but it also provided a large amount of investment in Boise.

In the realm of education, the effects of the act are diverse: From creating Boise State’s “Semiconductors for All” initiative to expanding the Boise School District’s career technical education (CTE) programs.

The Dehryl A. Dennis Technical Education Center (DTEC) is the Boise School District’s CTE high school. Students from the four Boise high schools commute to the campus between their regular classes at their high school. 

DTEC offers a wide range of classes including welding, machining, mechatronics, construction, Fire and EMT and many more. The mechatronics program supplies a handful of interns to Micron annually. 

DTEC Principal Jeff Roberts said that while their mechatronics program has the closest parallels to semiconductor manufacturing, the welding program saw the most growth in order to meet demand created by CHIPS.

Roberts said that DTEC can host twice as many welding students as it could before receiving funding from a Micron grant, and that they’ve had no issue filling those spots. 

“We have such a huge demand from students who want to be welders and now we have this gigantic need for welders,” Roberts said. 

DTEC expanded their welding program in order to fulfill the needs of the new Micron fab, where construction could take around a decade, Roberts said.

“They are going to need welders and electricians and HVAC and construction and everything within that spectrum,” Roberts said. “So every one of our programs is indirectly affected.”

Next door to DTEC is the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance (IDLA), an online middle and high school that also offers supplementary courses to students in those grades. In cooperation with Boise State’s Microelectronics Education and Research Institute (MER), IDLA has rolled out a course called “Chip, Chip, Hooray!” to educate eighth through 10th grade students on how semiconductors are made and potential careers in the semiconductor field.

Boise State seeks to fulfill a different demand. The programs at Boise State educate students to become engineers who design the chips that technicians manufacture.

“I wouldn’t say that [our programs] are changing in super substantial ways,” said Eric Jankowski, president of the Micron School of Material Science and Engineering at Boise State. “But there’s a lot of opportunity associated with the CHIPS and Science Act.”

Jankowski said the $6.3 billion allocated to Micron and a further $81 billion to the National Science Foundation over the next three years benefit Boise State.

“The demand for engineering and materials engineering specific jobs in Idaho and beyond is much higher than our ability to meet that demand right now, which is actually great from a student perspective,”Jankowski said. “If you get one of those degrees, you’ve got a career, you’ve got a job and it pays great.”

Jankowski explained that the value of such a degree at Boise State is incredible, offering students the opportunity to learn in a world-class facility at Boise State.

“A consequence of the sustained investment in the Micron School of Material Science and Engineering from Micron and a consequence of the opportunities afforded by the CHIPS and Science Act is that we have some of the best material science facilities in the world downstairs,” Jankowski said in reference to the Micron School of Material Science and Engineering’s building.

“There’s an MOCVD device. This was one of the devices that was used to discover the blue LED that won the Nobel Prize. We are the first university in the US that has a tool of this kind,” Jankowski said.

Because of Boise State’s unique relationship with Micron, it stands elevated in the realm of semiconductor manufacturing workforce development. This includes membership in a network called UPWARDS for the future, a US-Japan university partnership that includes Hiroshima University, Purdue and the University of Washington.

“Boise State is kind of batting above our weight on that, we’re in there with a bunch of big-name universities like Purdue,” said Boise State Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chair Neal Bangerter.

“Normally Purdue is a powerhouse in this kind of stuff, Boise State is not. But given our proximity to Micron and the fab going in, we’ve gotten to be involved in some things that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Bangerter referred to Boise State President Marlene Tromp’s attendance at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan in May of 2023, as a visible example of how Boise State has become a more prolific university on an international scale.

With the new Micron fabrication facility still years from completion, it’s likely these opportunities will evolve. But for the time being, the CHIPS and Science Act creates opportunities for thousands of Idahoans with increased funding for jobs, education and training.

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