Burn Lin knows the ins and outs of the tiny chips that power your phones, cars and gaming consoles, and he knows there aren’t enough workers to keep up with skyrocketing demand.

The electrical engineer started his career at IBM in 1970, but eventually returned to his roots in Taiwan where his work helped turn the island democracy into the chip-making capital of the world. He led technological breakthroughs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., today the crown jewel of Taiwan’s tech industry.

Now he’s been tasked with preparing the next generation of leaders for a murkier, more arduous future in the technology that makes much of modern life possible.

The world of semiconductors has changed since the former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president left the business. A severe pandemic-induced chip shortage laid bare the breaking points of a complex global supply chain. Rising geopolitical tensions have sown mistrust and prompted countries to pour money into chip-making facilities of their own.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is boosting demand for more efficient microchips. But semiconductor engineers are running up against the physical limits of Moore’s Law, a long-held projection that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years, making them smaller and faster.

The number of workers required to design, manufacture, test and package all these chips will be enormous. According to consulting and financial services giant Deloitte, semiconductor companies will need an additional 1 million skilled workers or more by 2030.

Lin, now dean of the College of Semiconductor Research at Taiwan’s Tsinghua University, knows he won’t be able to fill that gap. His school—created with government support three years ago to address the growing talent shortage—trains about 100 students every year, far short of the 10,000-some additional workers needed annually in Taiwan alone. But he hopes those few will become leaders that keep Taiwanese companies ahead.

For an island facing threats of military assault from China—which claims the island as part of its territory— a competitive edge in inimitable technology is even more critical. Taiwan manufactures one-fifth of the world’s chips and 69% of its most advanced ones. That dominance has become known as Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” since nations that rely on Taiwanese chips have incentives to help protect it.

The Times spoke with Lin about his efforts to keep Taiwanese talent ahead as the race for self-reliance in chips heats up, and how that competition is changing the industry. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How will the semiconductor worker shortage impact the industry? Does that mean some countries fall behind?

A: Countries have become more selfish, so to speak. They only worry about their own benefit, and forget that the semiconductor industry needs a lot of collaboration to grow.

There are some countries good at making equipment: for example, the U.S., Japan and Germany. There are some countries that are very good at design, very innovative. The U.S. is also a big contributor in that area. And then there are countries that are good in manufacturing. Even in the U.S., there’s Intel and Micron. And people think that our TSMC is very powerful, but if we don’t get all the materials and equipment, we stop operating in a few weeks.

So if there are four countries that would like to be independent, then it just thins down the process and makes the efforts very uneconomical. You have to do four times the research instead, with many duplicating each other’s work.

Q: Does that mean that accepting interdependence would alleviate the worker shortage?

A: Yeah, that would greatly alleviate that. For U.S. students, most of them want to go into design, if they go into semiconductors at all. So where do you find the other people for other disciplines?

Q: Is the shortage because demand is growing or there are fewer people interested in this field?

A: Both.

The need for more advanced chips is very high. And there are a lot of other fields for people to choose from. Even in Taiwan, people used to pick semiconductors as one of their top choices. But now they have their eyes on so many other areas, like the financial sector, medicine, biological science, politics and so forth.

I think in the U.S. or Japan, the situation is worse, because those people have even more choices. They would rather go to work for Apple or Google, instead of going to work for [a chipmaker like] Intel. Intel used to be very attractive employer. That’s no longer the case.

Most new students want to study design instead of the manufacturing process. That’s the worldwide trend. We’re no exception here. People view sitting there as much easier, right? They don’t have to dress up for the clean rooms [where semiconductors are made]. They can just move their fingers instead of moving their feet.

There’s also this kind of social influence. The internet is so easy to reach, and pretty soon you find that all the students are contaminated. They are all connected to the web, and everyone thinks that, oh it’s much better to work sitting at a desk instead of working in a clean room. A lot of people are moving toward an easier life.

We have to make life more pleasant for people. Taiwanese companies, for example, you find gyms in there, cafeterias, good food and recreational equipment. So they are trying to make the workplace appealing.

Q: What’s been the biggest change since you were working in the private sector?

A: When I was working in the U.S. and in Taiwan, we spent a lot of time and effort to shrink the circuits from one generation to the next.

Moore’s Law of scaling has slowed, or I would even say stopped. The shrinking has to stop because we’re reaching the atomic level. But if we use the spirit of Moore’s Law, the spirit is that the technology will move on. If you rearrange the chip in a better way to use memory, you can make it work faster with less energy, but without changing the size.

Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not. Over the last few decades, we have become very lazy in innovating, because we thought, “If I can just scale it down, I can make it more attractive. Why bother to think about new things?”

The university then plays a very important role, because they can afford to look at new, high-risk things that you have to spend a lot of time studying to make sure are reliable and suitable for large-scale manufacturing. Right now, quantum computing is still at a very early stage, and people going into it are taking a very high risk. But we should still do that.

Q: Why did your college add a course for engineering students on geopolitics?

A: In addition to just making better chips, we now have to satisfy the policymakers and the people who control the money.

Learning about it doesn’t mean they have to become an expert. The industry has to hire some geopolitical experts or economic experts to guide them and negotiate or lobby for them. But for students, they have to be exposed to all kinds of possibilities.

For example, if the customer is a government, then you have to know what they are thinking and what they need in addition to the technology. If your customer is in a foreign country, then you have to worry about whether you can sustain the relationship or whether there will be other political forces that break it.

Q: Has it become harder to work in the semiconductor industry compared with 20 to 30 years ago?

A: Yeah, it’s harder. But it’s more fun. It’s less routine. It’s a growing industry. So people see the potential in it.

2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Researchers have developed a new organic thermoelectric device that can harvest energy from ambient temperature. While thermoelectric devices have several uses today, hurdles still exist to their full utilization. By combining the unique abilities of organic materials, the team succeeded in developing a framework for thermoelectric power generation at room temperature without any temperature gradient.

Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Thermoelectric devices, or thermoelectric generators, are a series of energy-generating materials that can convert heat into electricity so long as there is a temperature gradient—where one side of the device is hot and the other side is cool. Such devices have been a significant focus of research and development for their potential utility in harvesting waste heat from other energy-generating methods.

Perhaps the most well-known use of thermoelectric generators is in space probes such as the Mars Curiosity rover or the Voyager probe. These machines are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, where the heat generated from radioactive isotopes provides the temperature gradient for the thermoelectric devices to power their instruments.

However, due to issues including high production cost, use of hazardous materials, low energy efficiency, and the necessity of relatively high temperatures, thermoelectric devices remain underutilized today.

“We were investigating ways to make a thermoelectric device that could harvest energy from ambient temperature. Our lab focuses on the utility and application of organic compounds, and many organic compounds have unique properties where they can easily transfer energy between each other,” explains Professor Chihaya Adachi of Kyushu University’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research (OPERA) who led the study.

“A good example of the power of organic compounds can be found in OLEDs or organic solar cells.”

The key was to find compounds that work well as charge transfer interfaces, meaning that they can easily transfer electrons between each other. After testing various materials, the team found two viable compounds: copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) and copper hexadecafluoro phthalocyanine (F₁₆CuPc).

“To improve the thermoelectric property of this new interface, we also incorporated fullerenes and BCP,” continues Adachi. “These are known to be good facilitators of electron transport. Adding these compounds together significantly enhanced the device’s power. In the end, we had an optimized device with a 180 nm layer of CuPc, 320 nm of F₁₆CuPc, 20 nm of fullerene, and 20 nm of BCP.”

The optimized device had an open-circuit voltage of 384 mV, a short-circuit current density of 1.1 μA/cm², and a maximum output of 94 nW/cm². Moreover, all these results were achieved at room temperature without the use of a temperature gradient.

“There have been considerable advances in the development of thermoelectric devices, and our new proposed organic device will certainly help move things forward,” concludes Adachi.

“We would like to continue working on this new device and see if we can optimize it further with different materials. We can even likely achieve a higher current density if we increase the device’s area, which is unusual even for organic materials. It just goes to show that organic materials hold amazing potential.”