ship with SECME, and a minority pre-college success program that provides professional development for teachers.¹⁷

The SIA also sponsors a program for technicians with the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC) to support community college programs for developing fab employees, including undergraduate program assistantships and a program for foundry employees who want to learn design. The SRC has provided support through contract research for master’s and Ph.D. students since its founding in 1982.

He described the industry’s environmental health and safety emphasis, which has earned it a number-two ranking out of 208 manufacturing industries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number-one industry, which assembles communications equipment, does not work with the chemicals and gases that are part of the semiconductor industry. The objective of the semiconductor industry is to move to the number-one ranking, and, more broadly, for all companies once a year to share best practices and to achieve the same worker health standards worldwide.

He closed by stating that the outlook for the industry remains positive. “In our view, it continues to be as strong today as it was 10 to 15 years ago.”

In response to a question about funding, he added that the SRC has minimal government involvement—by design. The industry, he said, felt that it needs to provide the funding for the SRC because the research is mainly precompetitive. It has also been internationalized because investments benefit companies around the world. The SRC would like more industrial support, not more federal support; federal funds, it feels, should be devoted to basic research.¹⁸ He also said that funding for the Focus Centers is shared among the SIA (50 percent), the equipment companies (25 percent), and DARPA (25 percent) for the support largely of crosscutting technologies, such as metrology. One option is to include other industries in this support, since the research is often broadly based.