Baker-Polito Administration Awards $1 Million to WPI

The Baker-Polito Administration announced a new $999,963 grant from the Collaborative Re-search and Development Matching Grant program to support a new research center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) focused on the security of semiconductors and hardware critical to key innovation industries.

The new facility will enable a critical testbed for WPI and partners to work with private industry, utilizing new testing equipment that will be the first of its kind in the Northeast, plus will develop training programs to support the workforce needs of technology companies in the region.

Lt. Governor Karyn Polito announced the new grant from the Commonwealth through the program managed by the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), which will co-invest in a two-year, $1,999,326 project to develop the new center. In addition to leadership from WPI, the facility is supported by public and private sector re-search partners from across Massachusetts and the U.S., including:

• Leading academic research institutions: Northeastern, UMass Amherst, and Quinsigamond Community College (QCC).
• Five industry leading companies: Analog Devices, Dell, General Dynamics, Google, Intrinsix.
• A federally funded R&D center: MITRE.

“This project highlights the leadership that Massachusetts can play on issues critical to our innovation economy,” said Gov. Charlie Baker. “We congratulate WPI, as well as their public and private sector partners, for developing a project that will provide critical testing capability and a talent pipe-line that will help us address a supply chain that is heavily concentrated overseas and prone to dis-ruption.”

“This grant program is an important way for us to invest in infrastructure statewide which can be utilized by established companies and growing startups to help advance their cutting-edge products,” said Lt. Governor Karyn Polito. “Semiconductors are critical components for technologies and computer systems that are critical to energy, transportation, communication, and healthcare sec-tors. WPI has been a strong partner in supporting our innovation economy, and this new center, with its focus on manufacturing and cybersecurity, will help bolster our ‘Made in Mass’ products and increase their competitiveness globally.”
 
The state grant will fund the purchase of a new, high-sensitivity, high-resolution semiconductor failure analysis system, the first instrument of its kind in the Northeast. The new R&D tool and related workforce programs will address the strong security needs in the semiconductor industry, enabling integrated chip debugging & diagnosis, and failure analysis. These are critical tasks for the manufacture of secure semiconductors, which are key components to electronic products.

Building these capabilities in the U.S. will help address increasing market demand for secure semi-conductors and to decrease impacts from non-domestic sources, including supply chain interrup-tions, defective chips, and counterfeiting. The Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that counterfeit chips cost U.S.-based companies more than “$7.5 billion per year, which translates into nearly 11,000 lost American jobs.”

To date, the Collaborative R&D Matching Grant program has awarded more than $28 million, lev-eraging more than $50 million in matching contributions from outside partners. This includes 10 projects that have supported innovative industry/academic collaborations and investment in novel R&D infrastructure to bolster the Massachusetts tech and innovation economy statewide.