National Research Council. "I. Introduction." Securing the Future: Regional and National Programs to Support the Semiconductor Industry. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003. 1. Print.
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
informed industry representatives see a growing problem. For example, John Kelley of Novellus observes that the problems facing the supplier industry are “fairly simple and straightforward.” The first is the undersupply of talented graduate students. He said that the good news is that many of the students they have hired trained through the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and were prepared to “hit the ground running.” The bad news is that there are not enough of them, and the situation seems to be worsening. Many graduates have moved away from the semiconductor industry into other areas, such as nanotechnology, he said, and the professors have been going “where the money is.”74
In the sheer production of engineers, the United States lags its current and future competitors in the microelectronics industry (See Figure 10). Japan now produces about 63 percent more engineers per year than the U.S., while China produces more than twice as many—roughly 136 percent more.75 While there may be issues of quality and industry-related experience, in sheer numbers Asia
74
See Panel V of the proceedings in this volume. Other industry representatives and analysts echo this view. See the presentations of Michael Polcari of IBM, Kalman Kaufman of Applied Materials, and George Scalise of the Semiconductor Research Corporation in the Proceedings of this volume. For an analysis of the high demand in emerging areas such as bioinformatics, see Paula Stephan and Grant Black, “Bioinformatics: Emerging Opportunities and Emerging Gaps” in National Research Council, Capitalizing on New Needs and New Opportunities: Government-Industry Partnerships in Biotechnology and Information Technologies.
75
National Research Council calculations derived from the National Science Foundation’s, Science and Engineering Indicators 2000. It is important to note that material scientists are increasingly engaged by the semiconductor industry. A recent study (July 2002) by the OECD asserts that “there
