ChipReady joins the national network building America's chip workforce

We have news we have been quietly working toward for the better part of a year.

ChipReady.org is a funded partner in PINES — the Pacific-Intermountain Network for Education in Semiconductors — one of the regional nodes of the National Network for Microelectronics Education. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 25Z2966, administered by the SEMI Foundation, with Boise State University leading the node and ChipReady participating as a subrecipient.

In plain terms: the federal government is funding a coordinated effort to build the semiconductor workforce, and we are part of it.

Why a network, and not another program

The United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bring chip fabrication home. Micron alone is investing roughly $30 billion in Boise — the Department of Commerce estimates that single build-out will create at least 4,000 engineering and technician jobs in the city, and 17,000 across the supporting economy.

The constraint on all of it is not capital. It is people.

What has made that hard to fix is not a shortage of good programs. It is that the good programs do not add up to a system. A community college in eastern Washington and a research university in Colorado can both teach semiconductor fundamentals well and still leave a student unable to carry credit between them, or an employer unable to tell what either credential means. Cleanroom access — the thing that separates someone who has read about a fab from someone who has stood in one — sits in a handful of buildings across an enormous region.

PINES exists to connect those pieces rather than add another one. Nine states. Thirty-three members — universities, community and technical colleges, employers, industry councils and workforce agencies. Shared curriculum, shared lab access, and credentials that mean the same thing in Boise as they do in Honolulu.

What ChipReady is responsible for

Our part of the work is specific, and we would rather state it plainly than dress it up.

Convert our semiconductor curriculum into interactive e-learning. Four modules covering the core of wafer fabrication — metrology, deposition, etching, and lithography. Not slides with a quiz bolted on: recorded instruction with exercises, built so someone who has never touched this material can follow it.

Run cleanroom cohorts with the Washington Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Washington. Participants finish the four modules, then spend six to eight hours gowned and inside a working cleanroom, watching WNF engineers run the tools behind every module they studied. That is not a tour. It is the difference between knowing what an evaporator does and having stood next to one while it ran.

Report on all of it. Who enrolled, who completed, who went on. Public money should produce accountable numbers, and we committed to producing them by May 2027.

The first cohort opens in November 2026. It is free — no tuition, no fee, and cleanroom suits, materials, lunch and transit options are provided. Details and enrollment are here.

The part that matters to us

There is a line in our founding documents that we keep coming back to: roughly 60% of the new roles in this industry do not require a four-year degree. Technicians. Operators. Process specialists. People who can be trained in months rather than years, into work that pays well and is not going offshore again.

Almost nobody tells them that.

A federal award does not change that fact on its own. What it does is give us the standing to be in the room where the regional pipeline gets built, and the obligation to prove the model works with numbers rather than conviction. Both of those are worth having.

We are grateful to Boise State University for leading the node, to the Washington Nanofabrication Facility for opening its cleanroom to people who would otherwise never see one, and to the SEMI Foundation and the NSF for backing the idea that the workforce is the hard part.

Now we go and do it.

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This program is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 25Z2966, as part of the National Network for Microelectronics Education administered by the SEMI Foundation. ChipReady.org participates as a subrecipient of Boise State University. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of ChipReady.org and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.