A Response to the UK Industrial Strategy: Fixing the Skills Shortfall in the UK Semiconductor Industry

By Rachel Oliver FREng, Professor of Materials Science, University of Cambridge; Advisory Board Member to the APPG

The Government’s recently launched industrial strategy included a raft of new or revitalised semiconductor initiatives under the banner of the Digital and Technologies Sector Plan.  This plan aims to ensure a strategic approach to R&D and to accelerate innovation and commercialisation.  Such lofty ambitions can only be realised if a sufficient supply of skilled workers is available.

The plan includes £35 million of additional funding for the Semiconductor Talent Expansion Programme (STEP), an initiative recently launched by DSIT in collaboration with the UK Electronic Skills Foundation.  Actions announced to date focus largely on the needs of the semiconductor design sector, and include bursaries for undergraduate electronics engineers and an e-learning course focussed on chip design.

Whilst the design sector is crying out for this improved pipeline of design engineers, other parts of the semiconductor innovation ecosystem are suffering equal or worse talent shortages, but have thus far attracted limited attention from STEP.  A feasibility study is planned addressing a development programme for physics undergraduates seeking entry into the sector, but this also emphasises design skills.  Meanwhile, the Digital and Technologies Sector plan aims to attract investment into semiconductor manufacturing and highlights the Welsh compound semiconductor cluster and companies like Pragmatic Semiconductor, with their world-leading flexible integrated circuit technology.  These examples illustrate the UK’s niche manufacturing strengths in compound semiconductors and emerging materials, areas that require a pipeline of skilled staff in physics, chemistry, materials science and manufacturing engineering – topics that appear largely neglected by the skill strategy to date.

Moreover, the sector needs people with the capability to communicate across the sub-disciplines, to ensure (for example) that design engineers working with emerging materials understand the real strengths and limitations of the new technologies and equally that physicists bringing blue skies thinking to device development understand the real constraints of working with foundries and achieving commercially relevant yields.  A tight focus on design in the skills strategy fails to enable this interdisciplinary thinking, which is not only vital to the current industry, but will also enable new innovations, particularly in heterogeneous integration.

Most of the skills planning to date is also focussed on degree level or PhD level studies.  The education of the technicians and operators needed to keep manufacturing facilities running day-to-day has been almost ignored. However, profound change is needed, firstly to ensure that semiconductor technical careers are visible to young people  in further education (FE) across the UK and secondly to provide those students with relevant training and experience.  Most FE colleges have no facilities to expose students to the cleanroom environments vital to semiconductor manufacturing.  Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Universities are responding to the broader demand for semiconductor skills by opening training cleanrooms.  This offers an opportunity – which could potentially exemplify a new strategy for the broader technology sector – to create collaborative initiatives between further and higher education that both bolster the pipeline of skilled technicians and improve social mobility.

Overall, the next iteration of the Semiconductor Talent Expansion Programme must think more broadly about the sector’s needs – in terms of both disciplinary scope and career pathways – in order to ensure that both business and the potential UK workforce can reap the benefits offered by a resurgent semiconductor sector.