I have been involved in the design and operation of chip plants
since the 1960s. They require uniquely qualified people trained over periods of not months but years. The equipment to build such factories is commercially available and is extremely complex and
automated.

But the key manufacturing enabler
is the people who operate it. It takes years to develop such expertise, and it is rare in the United States, as such manufacturing has largely gone overseas, leaving Intel as the
only domestic
manufacturer
of high-end
chips.

The United States still leads in the design of the highest-performance chips, and the recent success of Nvidia with leadership in AI-enabling chips (produced by TSMC) is an indication.

With the exception of Intel, the US industry was happy to outsource the production of the most sophisticated integrated circuits to TSMC, which proved to be a reliable leading-edge production company.

Gradually, TSMC acquired the facilities and skill to produce the best leading-edge devices designed by companies globally. It is today a very profitable high-volume chip manufacturing technology leader. With scale comes market position and economics of production, and the company is very profitable. Any potential competitor has many barriers to overcome, and the biggest ones are in management and staff expertise.

What makes high-end chip manufacturing so challenging are two factors. The first is the shrinking dimension of transistor core devices that are now in the low-nanometer range (approaching interatomic dimensions), and second, the need to manage a production process where different very thin chemical materials are deposited on a 12-inch-diameter (305-millimeter) silicon base.

Typically, more than 100 such films must be deposited and patterned using a variety of techniques, and the specific configurations must be controlled for different device structures. Within these three-dimensional structures are patterns that need to be created for circuit interconnections.

So
you have a production process that requires both thin-material technologies and accurate patterning of near-atomic dimensions. A finished chip may have several billion transistors interconnected per square inch of surface.

Controlling such a production process is arguably the most difficult
manufacturing problem
in the world. Different products require different production steps that number in the thousands from start to finish. There can be no errors in the production process, as errors will impact the performance of the devices.

You can imagine the difficulty of entering such a challenging production business. It is no wonder that chip design companies have chosen to avoid owning such production plants when TSMC does such a great job economically.

And
now comes the US government offering financial
support
for entrants into
this production business. Only the hardiest will make the commitment, but staffing will be the biggest challenge.

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Operating a chip plant with this complexity requires people with a high level of technology skills. Above all, it requires people well-schooled in the chemical, mechanical, and electronic technologies underlying the production process.

In a company like TSMC, it is production technologists that are the ultimate decision-makers because they best understand the tradeoff between process yield and device performance. It is that effective decision process that is reflected in the company's production performance and cost.

Is there a way to meet the US government's goal? Only if a serious investment in the right educational programs is made, possibly through state-funded community-college training with rigorous standards.

This is not a short-term endeavor. I believe that training for the most modern manufacturing industries will, in general, benefit the US economy and reverse what has been a continuing decline in domestic high-technology industries.

The combination of capital and a highly trained workforce is needed. Without much more of the right vocational education, US
taxpayers' money
will be wasted.

Henry Kressel is an inventor, technologist and author, as well as a long-term private equity investor in technology companies.