Building the Semiconductor Workforce of TomorrowBuilding the Semiconductor Workforce of Tomorrow

Building the Semiconductor Workforce of Tomorrow Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Jeff, I’m doing well. How are you doing? 

Jeff White: I’m doing great, thanks. 

Carman Pirie: I think I love today’s show. We’re talking about something a little different than our norm.

And I’m just fascinated by the work they’re up to. I wanna learn more, and I think our listeners will wanna learn more. 

Jeff White: I think we’ll wanna dig into this as well. So joining us today is Paul Kelly. Paul is the COO of NY CREATES. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Paul. 

Paul Kelly: Oh, welcome. And thank you very much for having me. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Paul, it’s wonderful to have you on the show, particularly with that radio voice that you got on. My goodness. 

Paul Kelly: That’s very kind of you. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. We might find, just come clean with us. You’ve been a radio announcer for the last 30 years or something at Albany, haven’t you?

Paul Kelly: Just in the background? No, actually, no, I haven’t. But someday aspire to it. 

Carman Pirie: There you go. Paul, look, let’s start. I’d love to just get an introduction to NY CREATES. I’m certain that most of our listeners may not be aware of the organization or if they’ve only tangentially heard about it, they’re not quite sure what to all do. So let’s just start there and see where we end up. 

Paul Kelly: Sure. So NY CREATES, creates is an acronym. Is the Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Sciences. Very long name. That’s why CREATES makes it so much easier. We do go by just CREATES in many cases. So we are a non-profit research organization that focuses on next-generation technology.

We enable public, private, and academic partnerships. To advance global technology in the industry by attracting leading-edge technology companies to leverage our facilities and focus on the next generation of semiconductor technology. So we are located, headquartered in Albany, New York. We have a 300 millimetre semiconductor research and development facility.

So we basically build computer chips of tomorrow. We focus, at our site, on anything from 65 nanometers down to sub-two-nanometer computer chips. Two nanometers is cutting-edge right now in the industry. It is something, your iPhones and your computers, it’s a step beyond that stuff that we’re working on will be in the industry probably about five years from now.

Jeff White: Wow. Before we get too far in, ’cause I think we really wanna dig into what you’re doing there with the equipment and the facilities that you have, but give us a bit of a sense of your background as well, and how you ended up there. 

Paul Kelly: Sure. So I have been at our site for about 15 years. I came to the site working overarching program management focusing on major consortia. My first consortium here on site had the large semiconductor industries, actually, so TSMC, Samsung, IBM, Intel, and Global Foundries, all working on the next generation of technology. With the Global four 50 millimeter program, so focusing on the next generation of wafer size. Since then worked on very diverse technology roadmaps from power electronics all the way to the cutting-edge technologies that we’re focusing on. So for the last 15 years, I took on various roles and became the COO roughly about six years ago and helped lead the organization to the global epicentre that it is today.

Carman Pirie: That’s a fascinating journey, Paul, and it’s really interesting work that… I know that there’s a bunch of kind of interlocking parts here between R&D and kinda workforce development, and of course, what that means for more broad, probably more for economic development, more broadly overall. How do we begin to wrap our heads around the impact that you are creating here? 

Paul Kelly: That’s a great question. We really have three pillars of our mission. First is the R&D focused on the next generation of technology. We have facilities that enable companies like IBM, Tokyo Electron Screen, which will allow for the next generation of technology to happen for years to come.

We’re also about economic advancement. We wanna make sure that as we bring in companies to our site as well into New York, that we’re able to help them get started, get them up and running. We work with many large companies, including the ones I just mentioned. We also work with a lot of startups that may not be able to afford to enter the semiconductor market on their own.

So we offer them a window into the technology space that allows them to get going and really advance their technology or their vision to create. Technically, the technology of tomorrow, and then we’re about workforce development. In order to have all the work that is needed in the semiconductor industry, we need to have and make sure we’re creating a pipeline of talent.

So we go out and work with everybody from K-12s in the high school to colleges and universities to try to create a pipeline for our industry. And so that people learn the various needs in the semiconductor market. Now, that crosses a broad array of needs. Not everybody in semiconductors needs to be a PhD scientist.

There are people in clean rooms that all you need is a high school degree in order to actually be the person who is helping create those computer chips. So we’re helping educate that workforce of tomorrow and really trying to help drive that so that we can make sure that as companies start to grow in New York, they have that talent ready to be hired for years to come.

Jeff White: Where’s the bulk of your, when you’re looking at how NY CREATES faces the market, and what is the bulk of your sort of external-facing work in recruiting new companies to come in and be part of that development program? Or would you be focusing more on trying to help people understand the value of this and driving that educational initiative and things like that? Where’s the focus? 

Paul Kelly: So the focus is really on trying to make sure that their talent pipeline is there for the education or the needs of tomorrow. We want to make sure that we’re creating an ecosystem for those companies to drive the technology. We wanna be part of the conduit in order to help drive that. That’s not to say that we don’t have research going on of our own. We have a full suite of engineering teams that we also focus on research, but we wanna be the conduit, the infrastructure that allows for the technology of tomorrow to happen in a more cost-effective way. 

Carman Pirie: It does make sense to me that the workforce development side of that might be the hardest side.

Paul Kelly: It really is. Many people see semiconductors and instantly shy away. They say, oh, that’s gotta be a PhD scientist. That really is the person who’s going to be the person who’s gonna be working in that industry. And in fact, it’s not a majority of the people who are running the fabs; the actual movers in the fabs are not PhD-level people. In order to run a clean room, you need people who are water people, HVAC people. You need the electrical and the facilities engineers in order to keep your facilities running. They are incredibly important to keep a clean room where you actually do that chip work at the level that it needs to be to create those computer chips.

So we’re here and helping try to drive the talent pipeline to complete all of the jobs from those PhD scientists all the way to the entry-level roles that are ultra important to be successful in the industry. 

Jeff White: Many years ago, I was lucky to have the opportunity to help create an educational network for a large forestry company in our region. That was primarily about a similar sort of thing. I don’t think people necessarily understood just how high-tech forestry had become and how important it was to instill those ideas at a young age. So our programming went in at grade four or grade five, and that was instrumental in helping to drive interest as people grew up and began to look at where their careers were going to go. You’ve been there for 15 years now. How have you seen the success of the program in terms of generating people who are interested in joining the semiconductor workforce? 

Paul Kelly: So we’ve really been very successful in helping drive the next generation of talent. And we do that by doing a lot of outreach. 

Exactly what you just said, making sure we’re hitting the school-aged people to help them understand that this is an achievable career. We also started focusing on the re-skilling of talent. Many people want to have a career well into their sixties, and it may not be the career that they started out with that they wanna be doing in their later years.

So we work with people to help reskill incredibly valuable skill sets that they have, and how that transitions well into the semiconductor world. I’ll give you a very good example of our Vet Step program, which is part of the Skill Bridge Network with the US Army people who are exiting the last year of their army career.

They have incredible skills that they learned there. We work with them in trying to transition those skills to the semiconductor market. Those people will spend time here in Albany as we help with that transition, and then they will go spend time with some of our industry partners and end up in a career there.

Of all the people that have come through this program, about 90% of ’em have elected to go into a semiconductor career, and those 10% that haven’t. Are really people who have decided that’s really not the program for them and they’ve gone on to other successful stuff. But we’re very happy that we’re able to provide a broad array of pipeline talent to our industry partners in order to make sure that we’re filling those gaps of tomorrow.

Carman Pirie: It’s really impressive. Paul, I wonder, it just occurs to me that as we think about growing the workforce of the future, encouraging workforce development, we’re having this conversation in an age of AI, and I can’t help but think that that must be factoring into some of your thoughts. And how you’re seeing your role. And so I just wonder how it’s changing? How is your notion of workforce development changing as you look at what’s happening with AI and where it may be going? 

Paul Kelly: So it’s actually very interesting because AI is driven by computer chips. The computer chip is the base market that allows for those AI devices to function. But AI is also extremely important in streamlining how things are done, and leveraging that technology is extremely important in running fabs and running the daily operations as well. So we will leverage AI to either make sure we’re able to create those computer chips in the best mechanism forward, and also as we continue to operate and run our clean rooms. Are we doing that in the most efficient way? So we’re leveraging AI in our building management systems to ensure we keep the clean rooms functioning at the highest possible level. 

Jeff White: I love the cyclical nature. It feels very much like it’s a flywheel that’s working. 

Paul Kelly: That is hopefully something that will, we’ll be there forevermore.

There are a lot of people who are fearful of AI, but as we harness AI, I think it’ll be an incredible resource for the world to continue moving forward in the right direction. 

Carman Pirie: Jeff, you mentioned the cyclical nature of that, which is exactly at the back of my mind, and why I asked the question.

It just wouldn’t have been at all surprising to hear that there are some kind of roles that were maybe starting to not encourage people to lean into too much, or what have you, because we maybe imagine them changing in an incredibly material way very quickly. Yeah, it just seemed to me that there are a lot of different components to the intersection between AI and workforce development. 

Paul Kelly: There absolutely is. And, like the ever-evolving world, it’s really how you harness it from the elevator operator, the newspaper carrier, from the past to how everything is delivered today.

Your jobs in the semiconductor market are going to be very much influenced by how technology, not just AI itself, but how technology will be driving those positions of tomorrow. And we want to be the ones to help make sure that pipeline is appropriately recognized, and we’re creating those jobs for those people to understand those jobs of tomorrow.

Carman Pirie: Paul, changing gears just a little bit. It just occurs to me. The semiconductor space is very large, and New York is a very large state, of course, but it’s not the entirety of the world. My guess is based upon their leadership position that the organization must get pulled outside of its borders quite a bit.

Paul Kelly: We do we have a worldwide impact. NY CREATES has partnerships in Japan, in Asia, in Europe and in the US, not just in New York, but in many states in the US. We value the diverse population that we work with, and we make sure that we’re leveraging those companies to provide the best value. Many of the equipment suppliers that we have as partners on our site, Tokyo Electron screen, applied materials, make up areas in either Asia or in the US, and we want to make sure that we’re keeping that broad outreach. 

Carman Pirie: That’s yeah, it’s impressive. So often, when you hear about a nonprofit organization that has a center of gravity to it that has borders, et cetera.

Sometimes I find that those organizations, their reach doesn’t always match their ambition because of that false limitation. So it’s just really, I think, encouraging to know that the organization has that kind of global impact and global reach. The leadership seems incredibly important to me. 

Paul Kelly: The leadership here is that our president, David Anderson, has an incredible vision of how to continue to grow our organization in support of the semiconductor industry. And in order to do that, we need to make sure that we’re doing the right outreaches to the various countries and to the various states in the US to make sure that we’re able to pull the best talent in and the best partners in.

To ensure that the work of tomorrow is happening in the Albany Nanotech site, which is our Albany location. 

Jeff White: I have to think too, there’s a political component probably to this as well or around especially as you expand into different jurisdictions as well as I’m not sure if there’s a fund, any sort of funding arrangements in those ways, but are also in addition to managing workforce development and startups and larger enterprises, are you also managing investor relationships with both public entities and private? 

Paul Kelly: So, we do a really broad outreach with the federal government and New York State’s government as well. One of our programs, or actually two of our programs are federally initiated program. We are the home of a US manufacturing institute focused on AIM Photonics, which basically is, instead of electrons moving throughout the computer chip, we use light. Going through the computer chip, which allows for things like data centers to be able to move data in a much faster way. We’re also part of the Microelectronics Commons, which is a DOD-funded program that focuses on bringing the lab to fab roadmap in a much closer proximity. And we are the lead role in the company or the organization called Nortek, which we partner with IBM, the State University of New York RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell to lead that microelectronics commons hub in the Northeast.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I see a very broad stakeholder ecosystem that you articulate there. Paul, it occurs to me that you’ve just been in that you’ve been in the organization for a very long time and deeply experienced, but it’s working in a space that is moving incredibly fast. And quite candidly, maybe selfishly, we have a number of organizations that we work with that sell into the semiconductor space. So I’m very curious to get your crystal ball analysis about where you think things are going and what you see on the horizon within the sector that you think maybe others don’t? 

Paul Kelly: Really good question. The industry of tomorrow is really evolving really quickly.

The landscape in the past used to be on really three sectors, logic, memory and novel emerging technologies. The path of Tomorrow has multiple fronts that we’re now seeing, whether it be new types of base sources, whether it’s silicon carbide, gallium nitride, the silicon-based glass-based, diamond-based substrates, focusing on next-generation power electronics.

Quantum is by far gonna be one of the leading-edge areas that we’ll see emerging in the future. One of the other areas is advanced packaging. In the past, computer chips were driven to the smallest nanometers, so the ability to make them as small as possible and as fast as possible. Tomorrow, what we’re going to see is people focusing on advanced packaging and packaging is making sure that we’re able to bond different chips together to equally put them in a small area in your phone or your computer, or your TVs, your appliances of tomorrow, but also be able to do multiple types of devices. In that small area, Nvidia is doing extremely well right now with its AI devices. Their packaging is really what’s allowing Nvidia to drive the next generation of where they are in adjacent to their computer chip prowess. But, packaging is going to be the real leading face of the semiconductor market of tomorrow. 

Carman Pirie: I feel, Jeff, that we just like got a glimpse into the future or something.

It was just so lovely to have a guest like Paul on the show. Just working in a space that not a lot of other people see and working at a level that not a lot of other people get to work at. So, Paul, it’s been just really wonderful to have you on the show. I think to conclude, I’d like to go back to that workforce development and what’s your message to somebody that’s maybe in grade 10 or grade 12 and planning a career ahead. ‘Cause if we have even one of them listening to this podcast, I’d like for them to hear what you have to say and what advice you have to give them.

Paul Kelly: Yeah. I actually have a freshman in college. I have two kids who are, one’s in grad school. One is actually post-college. 

There are jobs in the semiconductor market. One thing that we want people to be very well aware of is that regardless of your focus, whether it’s on science or whether it’s on accounting, or whether it’s on being a person in the trades, the semiconductor market needs you and really will value you as an incredible person to help lead the generations of tomorrow.

Carman Pirie: Oh, wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much. 

Paul Kelly: Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. 

Jeff White: Yeah, that was great. Thanks.