Rakheja receives grant to help close gap in semiconductor workforce

We are living in a time when the demand for semiconductors is skyrocketing, outpacing the workforce needed to produce them. One professor in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using a recently awarded grant to help increase the talent pool for manufacturing this vital technology. 

Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Shaloo Rakheja (also an affiliate of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Nick Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory) received a grant through Silicon Crossroads, a Microelectronics Commons hub administered by Purdue University. After Rakheja obtained a large grant through the CHIPS Act, she was contacted by the lead primary investigator, who wanted to connect her with this new funding opportunity.

Rakheja said the investigator was "looking for an expert in 5G/6G with a deep understanding of industry needs to help them establish thought leadership as well as create the content that would be needed." She said this opportunity excited her because, as part of her NSF CAREER award, she had wanted to create a new course—something that can be a major undertaking.

“It always seemed really daunting, because usually with content development, creating new materials, connecting it to industry needs—it just falls on faculty to be able to do it,” Rakheja said. “We have so many things we want to do, so oftentimes this doesn’t take priority, and we are focused on "research, guiding students, writing papers and proposals."

With this grant, Rakheja will have a team at Purdue that will review her work and provide feedback as she develops the coursework. “They have a team of people who design industry surveys to college knowledge, skills and abilities specific to 5G/6G," Rakheja said. The grant will also fund additional support to make the course possible.

Specifically, the grant will allow Rakheja to maintain a graduate student. “It provides them the financial support and a lot of training materials as well as the basic backbone of what it means to create new curriculum,” she said. “Because creating new curriculum is not, ‘Hey, I want to teach people about this and just let me go and start creating material.’ I think it has to be well thought out, organized and industry relevant to have high impact for our students."

The curriculum will be shaped by feedback from industry partners to ensure that students leave the university with knowledge that makes them invaluable in the workforce. Rakheja said the semiconductor industry faces challenges in finding enough workers with specialized expertise.

“There is definitely a problem that the demand is way more than the supply, and especially in areas like mine—it’s specialized, advanced knowledge, and there’s just not enough people to take up the jobs and make sure we are always creating the most advanced technologies,” she said.

The grant will also help Rakheja and her student develop course materials, host office hours and conduct lab sessions that provide students with hands-on training.

Rakheja called the funding a rare and welcome opportunity. “Normally for workforce development grants, we don’t have research assistant support—it’s literally on the professor to do everything, and we still do it,” she said. “But I think that if you want to do an amazing job, you need to have that support. My student can do the labs, and they have the expertise to do it, and that becomes so much more powerful.”