The CHIPS and Science Act and related programs have opened a wide range of funding opportunities and other resources to ensure the U.S. semiconductor industry, which is essential to the U.S. military industrial base, retains and enhances its worldwide competitive capabilities. New equipment and facilities at the leading edge of the industry’s work are among the parts of this effort most often highlighted
But even more important is providing what’s needed to train the people who will be the backbone of the U.S. semiconductor industry for years to come. For the past 10 years, I’ve been president of Linear Integrated Systems, Inc., a 37-year-old designer and manufacturer of precision small-signal discrete semiconductors based in Fremont, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Finding highly competent people who design, build, test and distribute our products has always been a challenging part of my job. This has worked out well for us — we’re lucky to have the team we’ve built.
Stretching STEM educational resources
CHIPS and related efforts contain a significant array of resources to support educating and training the semiconductor industry workforce we need. Congress and the Biden administration have dedicated a substantial amount of funding to these efforts.
But having spent decades in Washington, D.C., first as a journalist and then working with technology development, I’ll wager that money for training will start running short as other spending priorities emerge. We need to find innovative ways to stretch our industry training dollars, especially as advancing military threats spur the need for more advanced weaponry and a well-trained workforce.
One such resource is a new, freely available circuit simulation software program called QSPICE. For electrical engineers and those trying to learn that craft, such software enables them to create circuits of any complexity and determine if their design will work and how they might improve it. Such software often costs tens of thousands of dollars, putting it out of the reach of many engineering students and small-scale designers.
A short history of circuit simulation software
The Pentagon funded development of classified circuit simulation software in the 1960s to assist defense contractors in their work to develop weapons circuits of ever-increasing complexity. Wanting to provide this capability to the broader community of electrical engineers, University of California, Berkeley developed a version it called SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) and released it as an open-source analog electronic circuit simulator in 1973.
Awkward and buggy, the open-source SPICE was a big step forward, but only for the most skilled and patient of engineers. Not until Linear Technology Corp., now part of Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Analog Devices Inc., released its LTspice in 1999, freely available with restrictions, was a highly functional, easy-to-use circuit simulator. Its author, Linear Technology’s Mike Engelhardt, became a popular lecturer worldwide.
Fast-forward to the present. Engelhardt, as an independent consultant, pitched the idea to another semiconductor company, Qorvo Inc., based in North Carolina, of a completely new, vastly improved circuit simulation program to improve training. This program, eventually called QSPICE, would have improved modeling and simulation functionality and fundamentals.
And while LTspice has some restrictions as to who can use it, QSPICE would be unrestricted, meaning it’s available to everyone in the industry and community, even Qorvo’s competitors.
One of Engelhardt’s central goals for QSPICE was to improve, correct and extend the underlying device equations and to make it possible to better match a transistor’s behavior and to reduce the engineering resources needed to generate such improved models.
With respect to my company’s semiconductors, which are primarily small-signal Junction Field Effect Transistors, this has worked out well. JFETs are discrete transistors, the ones from my company are used in electronics systems ranging from studio ribbon microphones to U.S. submarine underwater listening systems.
Why circuit simulation matters for STEM
Looking further down the road, I’ve been working with colleagues in academia and the industry develop ways to support STEM students and programs to produce engineers capable of building the next generations of defense and commercial systems.
What we keep coming back to is that integrating circuit simulation at an affordable cost into STEM education – at the high school level if not earlier – will be a key part of supporting the creation of a first-rate future electronics work force. Knowing how parts are needed to perform in circuits is essential to designing effective semiconductors.
QSPICE is not the only option, and educators and the people who support them should look at all the tools available to help in their efforts. But QSPICE is an excellent circuit simulation tool, and as my late father, a Bell Labs electrical engineer, would have said, it’s cheap at twice the price.
