Lab to Fab; Mantooth Discusses Semiconductor Research and Fabrication at the U of A
It’s impossible to describe everything Alan Mantooth has accomplished at the University of Arkansas over the past 25 years, so I won’t try to cover it all in a 15 or 20 minute podcast. But we can at least give an introduction, and then we’ll focus on more recent research developments. Mantooth joined the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1990. Since that time he has received numerous teaching, service and research awards. He has published more than 550 refereed articles on the modeling and design of integrated circuits and power electronics, and he has co-authored three books. He holds 10 patents in these technical areas. In 2005, in response to the 2003 blackout on the power grid in the northeast part of the United States and Canada, Mantooth’s research team received a major grant to investigate alternative, solid-state solutions and technologies for upgrading the power grid. This led to the establishment of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission, or NCREPT, where he serves as executive director. Since that time, Mantooth and his research teams have received more than $200 million in additional federal funding to support various projects related to silicon carbide, or solid-state, solutions for power electronics. These funds have led to the establishment of several other research centers focused on power electronics as applied to transportation and the electric power grid.
In 2011, Alan Mantooth was promoted to the rank of distinguished professor. He has also co-founded three companies, Lynguent, Ozark Integrated Circuits and Bestazo. Welcome, Alan, and thank you for being here.
Alan Mantooth: Thank you.
MM: I want to start with a very basic question, so I’m sorry if this is an insult, but I think our listeners might appreciate it. Can you tell them what semiconductors are?
AM: Okay, so semiconductors are essentially materials that when activated with a voltage or stimulated with the current will then conduct electricity. So it’s when we think of the materials that make up our planet, they fall into one of three categories. There are insulators, there are conductors like metals, and then there are semiconductors, which means they can either insulate or conduct, depending on if they’re activated. That’s what makes semiconductors so important is because they can act like a switch. Turn it on, turn it off, you can change its properties in that regard.
MM: Where do we find them? What are they in?
AM: We find semiconductors in all of the integrated circuits and solutions that we commonly would find in our everyday lives, like consumer electronics. We find them in cell phones and televisions. We find them in automobiles, so they’re very ubiquitous. They’re in almost all parts of our life.
MM: We know that silicon is an essential material for the fabrication and manufacturing of chips and integrated circuits, but your work focuses on a slightly different material. Maybe it’s not slightly different. Maybe its total different. Silicon carbide is the material. Can you talk about this material, how or why is it superior to just silicon?
AM: Silicon carbide is an alloy. It’s a mixture of silicon and carbon. You put those two atoms together into a structure and you develop a new type of semiconductor. Silicon itself is a semiconductor. And so when we add the carbon content to it, in about equal proportions, we come up with this alloy called silicon carbide. Its properties, the carbon properties, change the properties of the silicon alone into a semiconductor that can operate at higher temperatures. So it’s big attractive feature is that it can operate at really extreme temperatures, five times boiling, five and six times boiling. So, five, 600 C. It can also… has higher voltage strength. So, intrinsically, in the structure of the material it, can withstand a lot more voltage. This makes it attractive for things like electric power grid applications.
MM: In 2021, your research team received a total of roughly $23 dollars, $18 million from the National Science Foundation and the rest from Army Research. These funds enabled your team to establish a silicon carbide semiconductor fabrication facility, subsequently named Multi-user Silicon Carbide Research and Fabrication Facility, or MUSiC. What is the mission of MUSiC?
AM: Okay, so the mission of MUSiC is quite simple. We’re attempting to create a bridge in the manufacturing gap that exists in America. Right now we have a lot of expertise, probably the world’s leading authorities around the nation, in this material system and the things that it can do for us in our everyday lives, like electrified transportation, electric power grid modernization and so forth. But these people have no place to do low volume prototyping. They can do it in their own university labs in one onsies twosies, but that’s just a lab demonstration. To do something that’s more pre-production, like in low volumes, there’s no place to do that at all. There is for silicon, but not for silicon carbide, and so and there are companies that do high-volume manufacturing of silicon carbide, but they’re captive to their companies. So they’re not open facilities. So we have bridged that gap by creating an open facility, where university researchers, national laboratories or even small and large businesses that don’t have access to this capability can prototype their ideas in a cost-efficient manner and then ramp it to high-volume manufacturing. So it really is part of the whole ecosystem of manufacturing from lab to fab.
MM: Now, your research team and two other teams at the university, also focused on semiconductors, are gearing up for something bigger. I want you to talk about that, but before you do, can we back up a little bit first, because I really enjoy listening to you explain the context or background, the need for your research. When the pandemic hit and supply chains were disrupted, we kept hearing about manufacturing delays because of the shortage of computer chips. Seems like most of this had to do with the automobile industry. Can you talk about what happened.
AM: So, when the pandemic hit, as many different situations, there was the need to try to avoid congregating. But what do you do when you’re going into a manufacturing plant? You’re bringing a lot of people together to build things. And so manufacturing, whether it was for production of food or whether it was for the production of computer chips, suffered as a result of that. And so the pandemic hit a lot of assembly line and manufacturing type of industries very hard. As a result, what we saw was a major slowdown in the production of computer chips, silicon chips primarily, and one of the reasons that this caused an interesting phenomenon or ripple effect was people do not realize how much computing power is in a vehicle these days. There’s computer control of the anti-lock braking system, the airbag system, of course the infotainment system, but also your ignition. All of these things are controlled by computer chips, and so therefore, you can build the fenders and the wheels and that sort of thing, but putting that intelligence inside these vehicles was impossible because of the shortage. And much of these much of these technologies are developed overseas. And so depending on where the pandemic was bad at a given time, whether that would be China, whether it be Taiwan, Japan, other places that we rely on for that supply, then it was disrupted.
MM: So now the federal government is looking at correcting this problem. Can you talk about a little bit about the? CHIPS and Science Act.
AM: Yeah. So the CHIPS Act really kind of fundamentally is focused on two main efforts – onshoring a lot of the capability that was outsourced to other countries 20 to 30 years ago. And trying to capture that supply chain. But then, in addition to that, is the workforce. CHIPS Act is about creating a workforce that can service these industries. When all of those industries got offshored in the ‘90s, then a lot of those jobs went. And so now we’re in a position where as a nation, we have to retool. And this is high tech jobs at all levels of education. This is two-year degrees, four-year degrees, graduate degrees. It’s the whole the whole value chain. And we have a huge gap in America that needs to be filled. And so a big part of this money that’s being authorized by the federal government is to go toward workforce development.
MM: So how do we… How does the University of Arkansas fit into this plan? I guess the question is, why are we uniquely qualified to be a major semiconductor research and fabrication hub, as part of the CHIPS Act funding here in the heartland of the U.S.?
AM: Arkansas, and not just Arkansas, but also other states very similar to Arkansas, here in the middle part of America, have not traditionally been a major supplier of talent to the semiconductor industry. Those have mostly been East and West Coast, and a lot of those universities were very strongly tied into semiconductor in their curriculum. And semiconductor fab facilities in their states. where these individuals will graduate and go to work… Well, it’s not that we didn’t have that curriculum, but there is not a chip plant in Arkansas or Oklahoma. There is Texas, so a lot of our students that would go into that area would be in Texas. Arkansas and the Heartland, if we’re going to close this workforce gap, has to have to have a seat at the table. They have to have the resources not only for the development of the workforce further, but also they have to have the resources for experimentation and development of the technologies. For young people to see that this is an opportunity, and they don’t have to go to the left coast or the right coast in order to get a job, that they can still continue to work in the heartland of America. So I think this is going to position us just outstandingly, because there’s an untapped resource, number one, and that’s the workforce. There’s expertise in these universities. And there’s the opportunity to locate some of those chip plants in the middle part of America, where they haven’t been before. One of the big reasons is natural resources. If you’re going to build chips, you need water. We have an Arkansas River. We have other things that are natural resources that would be a great attraction to people wanting to build plants. And we have relatively low cost of electricity in Arkansas compared to the East and West Coast. So as a result, that also makes it lower cost to operate. So these are all reasons why the Heartland is attractive. And I think that as this onshoring of these plants reoccurs, I think people are going to take a hard look at that. And you see Intel locating one in Ohio. Ohio’s not had one up till now. So I think this is starting to come to bear, and people are starting to recognize, where are the sweet spot locations in America where these things can be located? And it affords a great upside opportunity for those States and regions.
MM: Alan, this is long overdue. I really appreciate you being with us here today on Short Talks from the Hill. Thanks again.
AM: Thank you.
MM: Short Talks from the Hill is now available wherever you get your podcasts. For more information and additional podcasts, visit arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of research and economic development news at the University of Arkansas. Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris.
