Conference: 2025 CHIPS for Science Workshop

About This Grant

Nontechnical Description This NSF-supported workshop will identify innovative science use cases for the new, advanced semiconductor packaging facilities being developed now through the “Chips and Science Act of 2022.” This workshop will be hosted in late October 2025 in Austin, TX at The University of Texas at Austin. This site is chosen strategically because it is the site of the Department of Defense’s “Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing” facility, a state-of-the-art advanced electronics packaging center. While several recent meetings have focused on how science can be used to make better chips and microsystems, very few recent meetings have focused on how access to improved chips and microsystems can be used to advance scientific research. This workshop will bring together leading researchers from many different scientific fields alongside electronics packaging experts in government and industry to chart the future of electronics systems development to make better devices and sensors for U.S. scientific research. Technical Description The workshop will engage stakeholders from defense, national laboratories, universities, and industry to explore how this national investment in advanced packaging can be leveraged for research across a broad range of scientific disciplines, including but not limited to biotechnology, geophysics, astronomy, quantum and AI hardware, chemistry, and physics. Experts in these fields will learn from packaging experts what it is possible to achieve using advanced packaging. In addition, this workshop will allow advanced packaging experts and packaging facility directors to learn about the types of packaging architectures and technologies that will be demanded by scientific researchers in the future. This bidirectional exchange of expertise is both timely and critical because scientific research is often a leading-edge market that predicts what future industry needs might be. Therefore, this workshop will provide significant value both to researchers by allowing them to better plan for their future research, and to packaging prototyping facilities by allowing them to find new, future customers that will be willing to produce innovative designs and who are risk-tolerant during the prototyping phase of the development of new packaging technologies. Specific tracks for the conference include: (1) sensors and detectors for physical and chemical science, where the ability to build 3D stacks of interconnected sensors and readout circuits would drive down response time while improving resolution; (2) 3D heterogeneous integration for biomedical and environmental applications, where sensors need to be packaged with memory and logic on-chip for preprocessing of huge amounts of data prior to transmission to a wireless receiver; and (3) quantum and AI hardware, where integration of qubits and microwave-to-optical transduction chips has become stalled out with the limitations imposed by traditional packaging. The core goals of this workshop will be to: (1) nucleate a national academic userbase for the advanced semiconductor packaging facilities being developed now and (2) identify quick-win opportunities for scientific research that leverage these advanced packaging facilities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.