For example, at the beginning of 2023, TSMC, the world’s largest chip maker, began construction on a third chip fabrication plant near Phoenix, AZ. TSMC’s three Arizona plants have represented flagship projects for the CHIPS Act. The TSMC project stalled, however, and the company announced it had pushed back its completion date to 2025 due to problems finding skilled labor.
It takes two to three years of construction, a year or more for equipment installation and ramp-up, and more than $20 billion to build some leading-edge facilities, according to McKinsey. And each phase involved in getting a fab up and running requires different types of talent in varying numbers. Construction craft laborers are essential to the building phase, while engineers and technicians are required to design and set up equipment and process lines during the final phases of construction.
Once operations are under way, engineers and technicians are needed to fill roles in several areas: manufacturing, integration and yield, central labs, facilities, quality assurance, product management, industrial engineering, and more. A leading-edge fab with a capacity of 20,000 to 45,000 wafers per month, for example, would employ between 1,100 and 1,350 engineers and about 950 to 1,200 technicians.
While construction of plants could be affected by manual labor shortages, the bigger question is, once fabs are built, “will there be enough technicians and engineers?” said Gaurav Gupta, a vice president analyst at Gartner Research. The decline in chip manufacturing on US shores over the past four decades has led to a lack of interest by college students to enter the field, he said.
“Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are all partnering with universities and community colleges, and once there are job openings and students see, things will improve,” Gupta said. “I was recently at a conference where one of the topics being discussed was on talent and part of the reason chip firms don’t attract that is they don’t advertise it properly.”
A potentially bigger long-term problem, however, is that as a new generation of students and workers enters the semiconductor industry, they will have different priorities — and chipmakers will need to adjust to stay competitive for talent, according to Gupta.
