BY NBC NEWS
$35 million is minuscule in the high-tech, high-dollar world of semiconductor manufacturing.
Nonetheless, the 91,000-person city of Nashua, New Hampshire, may see substantial changes as a result of the Biden administration’s first CHIPS Act grant to the semiconductor plant owned by BAE Systems.
Director of Economic Development for Nashua, Liz Hannum, stated, “We have a really great workforce that is underemployed right now,” and added that the money infusion will accelerate worker upskilling. “It will be fantastic to provide them with the training they require to land higher-paying jobs.”
According to Hannum, the biggest private employer in New Hampshire is the British defense contractor BAE.Hampshire
Monolithic microwave integrated circuits, which are essential for numerous military technologies, such as the systems found in F-35 fighter jets, are already primarily supplied by it to the US armed forces.
According to officials, the federal grant will be used to modernize BAE’s microelectronics center in Nashua, which has historically produced semiconductors for military aircraft and will enable the company to produce four times as many MMIC chips.Hampshire
Hannum continued, “They’re going to need a lot more jobs” to accomplish that.
However, the first gains will be gradual. Chip production is highly automated compared to other forms of manufacturing and usually doesn’t require large workforces; original estimates of the number of jobs that the CHIPS Act would create nationally were in the mid-five digits. Furthermore, Nashua has a long history of high-tech employment that predates BAE’s presence by decades, notably in defense applications.Hampshire
Several BAE operations are located in and near the city, including the Hampshire microelectronics complex. Only about 200 of the 3,700 employees of the corporation in southern New Hampshire work in this low-slung brick facility of 110,000 square feet, or just less than two football fields. This information comes from Cheryl Paradis, vice president and general manager of BAE’s Fast Labs branch.Hampshire
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She stated that at least 12% more people are anticipated to work at the facility, and BAE has promised to add at least six new technicians annually for the following five years.
Regarding the impact of the funding, which represents a small portion of the enormous $52.7 billion pool established by the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of last year, Paradis stated, “We’ll get to do new advanced designs on this new equipment, because it can handle more details, more capacity, and more capability.”Hampshire
According to her, “the modernization of this foundry is really going to secure our nation’s ability to continue providing the most situational awareness and the most survivability” for critical defense technologies. She also mentioned that about 80% of American fixed-wing military aircraft are protected by BAE’s electronic warfare systems.
Legislators who supported the proposal had tightened domestic control over supply chains for these delicate instruments as one of their main objectives.
Michael Schmidt, the director of the CHIPS Program Office, stated in a statement that “this proposed investment aligns with the core objective of the CHIPS Program to help fill specific needs in the national security ecosystem.”Hampshire
A CHIPS Program spokesman stated that the grant is still subject to change, much like other payments that will come out later. Subsequent actions involve a thorough examination by federal administrators, where grantees are evaluated based on private benchmarks, analogous to a “commercial diligence” procedure, before to being granted the award.
Although it is unclear how many jobs will be created by the CHIPS funds, chipmakers are in high demand. The United States lacks the skilled labor force necessary to promptly carry out its reshoring initiative after decades of outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing.
Therefore, the White House announced this summer that the CHIPS Act has sparked dozens of courses on the fundamentals of chipmaking, including the eight-to ten-week course that municipal authorities have scheduled at Nashua Community College. Students at Nashua will be trained in a variety of skills, including how to work in “clean rooms,” which are extremely controlled settings used to produce chips since even minute particles can cause harm.
The training program is a component of a $200,000 municipal incentive package that was crucial to BAE’s grant acquisition, according to the mayor of Nashua. The package is financed by funds the city obtained from the American Rescue Plan, which Democrats passed in 2021. According to Hannum, over the course of the next five years, the local funds will pay for the tuition of at least 180 students, which will assist a variety of employers.
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“BAE and some other nearby companies share many of those needs,” the spokesperson remarked.
Besides Marmon Aerospace & Defense in Manchester and other defense-sector businesses, Southern New Hampshire is home to several high-tech companies in the life sciences, such as Thermo Fisher Scientific, a diagnostic test manufacturer with locations in Portsmouth and Newington.
A portion of the Nashua training program is based on earlier workforce development initiatives that BAE and the city carried out together. According to Paradis, the community college’s previous microelectronics boot camp, which was founded in 2016, graduated 300 students and had a 98% job placement rate.
Furthermore, there will always be a need for workers to make sophisticated chips and for them.
“Volume increases are coming if you look at where we are as a country and where we need to go,” she declared.
