The Biden administration is opening up $285 million today in federal funding and seeking applications to launch an institute in the United States to establish digital twin projects for the semiconductor industry, which use virtual models to mimic real-world objects to optimize efficiency and reduce costs.

The funding is part of the CHIPS and Science Act, signed by President Biden in August 2022, that includes more than $52.7 billion for U.S. companies that produce chips and billions in tax credits to encourage investments in semiconductor manufacturing. The bill also provided $11 billion in funding for semiconductor research and development.

Digital twins allow semiconductor manufacturers to create complete virtual twins of factory equipment and entire buildings in the cloud as fully vested prototypes that can be manipulated and tested without needing to build them in real life. Since they can be operated and run virtually, factory management can experiment with new setups and builds to streamline, optimize and discover potential anomalies before putting them to use in real life.

As fully virtual objects, digital twins also open up opportunities for globally remote and diverse teams to collaborate together to do research in ways that weren’t possible before. This can combine technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, which give immersive “holographic” hands-on experiences that make it look like factory equipment is right there in front of you when wearing a VR or AR headset.

By fully simulating a factory floor, with all of its equipment, an engineering team could watch all of the inner workings and even micromanage the individual parts of the supply line. With VR equipment a single engineer could “walk the line,” and take a look at individual equipment and see if there was a particular piece that was slightly wrong, even when something wasn’t showing up in the virtual metrics and telemetry.

According to a 2022 Capgemini survey of organizations showed that companies using digital twins saw improvements up to 25% in system performance and up to 16% improvement in sustainability through the use of the technology.

The new institute, called CHIPS Manufacturing USA, will apply basic applied research into semiconductor digital twin development, establish and support shared physical and digital facilities, and provide training for workers to use the technology.

“This new Manufacturing USA institute will not only help to make America a leader in developing this new technology for the semiconductor industry,” said Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, “it will also help train the next generation of American workers and researchers to use digital twins for future advances in R&D and production of chips.”

The final project details will depend on the applicants that submit by a Sept. 9 deadline and outline how the new Manufacturing USA digital twins institute operates going forward.

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