Guest Editorial Special section on the 2023 SEMI Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference

As this Special Section goes to publication, semiconductor manufacturing in the United Status, and globally, continues to expand at a seemingly torrid pace. Assisted by government funding and driven in part by artificial intelligence workloads that gobble up increasing amounts of data center computing capacity, Intel and TSMC fabs are going up in Arizona, TI and Samsung fabs are coming to Texas, and Micron has big plans in New York. Unfortunately, just like those flying cars we were once promised, AI has not yet eliminated the need for the skilled trades and engineers required to build and successfully operate a fab. As a result, workforce development has become an important part of the increasingly complex semiconductor manufacturing process: Where are the thousands of engineers the semiconductor industry needs to staff these new fabs going to come from? How can we make more students excited about science and engineering? While the Guest Editors don’t have all the answers, we are happy that ASMC contributes to the solution by actively supporting student presentations and posters and annually recognizing the best student paper of the conference. And, maybe some day, the artificial intelligence systems that semiconductor manufacturing has enabled will give us those Star Wars or Star Trek robots that can build fabs and make chips too.