The US is ‘moving in the right direction’ and ‘doing the right things’ when it comes to semiconductors – but working better together is the key going forward.

That is how semiconductor ambassador Robert Quinn sums up the state of play right now.

“Is the US moving in the right direction? I think it is. Could it do better? Absolutely, it could do better. And there has to be more collaboration, because nobody’s doing this alone,” explains Quinn.

Collaboration is not always easy to come by amid such a fragile geopolitical state. On the one hand, the US inked a significant trade deal with Taiwan last month to help ‘drive a massive reshoring of America’s semiconductor sector’. On the other, China appears to be making progress in building out an EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography sector to overcome what the Asia Times calls the ‘most tightly held chokepoint in advanced chipmaking’, with the US blocking sales of ASML’s EUV lithography machines to China back in 2019.

Quinn notes the US wants to take control of EUV, but also notes that China’s semiconductor strategy is surging without EUV access. Yet he refers to the ‘three-headed dragon’, as per the title of an article he wrote. “You have Europe, you have the Americas, and you have Asia. We absolutely depend on each other, the international collaboration that has to happen for these GPUs and these cell phones that we carry in our pockets every day,” he says.

Based in Austin, Texas, Quinn’s ambassadorial travels spreading the good word have taken him to meet royalty in Oman, via the University of Sao Paulo, and back to Texas A&M, comparatively just down the road. Yet his journey is otherwise quite simple; inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice to ‘do something for others, ask for nothing in turn, [and] do it on a daily basis’, he began sharing his experience and ‘putting his two cents’ to the news on LinkedIn.

Today, with a fast-growing audience of 70,000 LinkedIn followers, he sees his role as to view the industry from 30,000 feet so everyone, from CEOs, to engineers, to ninth-graders, can get a handle on complex concepts – and how so much is interlinked.

“One of the things I’ve recently done in the last year was really saying, ‘I need to know this about 30,000 feet’,” says Quinn. “What does the electricity demand look like? Are we able to make that demand happen? What are the true bottlenecks of the industry? And lo and behold, it’s transmission lines. We can’t get the transmission lines to the data centres. How do we fix these problems? How do we look at build[ing] this sustainable industry?”

Another example, where Quinn is bullish, is robotics, which he sees as the ‘second wave’ of semiconductor demand after data centres. He describes the 30,000-foot view as: data centres built the infrastructure; AI created the intelligence layer; robotics deploys that intelligence into the physical world. And AI ‘accelerates the robotics wave while simultaneously driving even more chip demand.’

Referencing Austin now having full self-driving Tesla vehicles going around the city by themselves, Quinn notes it is a long – and expensive – road ahead. “I see robotics moving to the edge first, moving to very slow growth – just like we saw with Tesla,” he says. “That was 14 years in the making of data collection. That wasn’t ‘they added a chip here, they added a chip there’ but… data collection and integration of artificial intelligence, compounding all that information and creating that massive database of information for them.

“The price of chips is going up, there’s no question about that, they have to, and robots [are] going to have tens of thousands of dollars of chips in them,” Quinn adds. “The big customer is going to be corporations, and the data will be collected from those corporations, and then they’ll make it better.

“Robotics is going to be a great thing. I think it’s going to happen, it’s going to be a phase two of chip demand, but that’s coming in three, five years.”

Austin is home of the inaugural Microelectronics US event, taking place from April 22-23, and Quinn, who is on the advisory board of the event, says it is the ‘perfect’ hub for getting everybody together. “People don’t realise companies like Caterpillar [headquartered in Irving, Texas] have a semiconductor division, because they need chips to run these giant tractors, and GPS units, and all types of technology goes into these things,” he says. “People don’t realise the size of this industry and the demand where this is needed. It’s needed everywhere.”

For Quinn, it is all about spreading this message – and it is an exciting, energising, almost never-ending search for the latest innovations in this space. “I get to see the world from the inside out and be able to talk about the industry,” he says. “But I am up till about three o’clock in the morning every single day just reading the news.

“It is like drinking water out of a firehose.  A massive amount of information coming out every day – and this industry is moving so fast.”

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