Texas Instruments is set to receive up to $1.6 billion and as much as $3 billion in loans from good-old Uncle Sam under the CHIPS and Science Act, the US Commerce Department announced on Friday.

The award comes two years after President Biden signed into law the $53 billion funding bill, which is supposed to boost domestic semiconductor production and design and reduce the reliance on foreign suppliers. The non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT) announced today is said to support TI's plan to invest $18 billion into manufacturing on American soil by the end of the decade.

"Our investments further strengthen our competitive advantage in manufacturing and technology as we expand our 300mm manufacturing operations in the US," TI CEO Haviv Ilan said in a canned statement.

By 2030, he expects TI's internal manufacturing capacity to grow more than 95 percent.

Under that plan, TI says it'll construct three 300mm-diameter wafer fabs - two in Texas and a third in Utah - which will produce embedded and analog chips by the hundreds of millions per day when fully operational.

However, these won't be the most sophisticated chips out there. The "current and mature-node" parts produced by these fabs will largely use 65nm to 130nm process node tech. Meanwhile, the chipmaker's Lehi, Utah facility is slated to produce a smaller volume of more sophisticated chips, using 28nm to 65nm manufacturing tech.

While certainly not as flashy as the leading edge silicon pioneered by the likes of Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, which have received the lion's share of the US CHIPS funds, these older process nodes remain quite relevant, being used in embedded applications ranging from washers and dryers to the engine control units in automobiles.

"During the pandemic, shortages of current-generation and mature-node chips fueled inflation and made our country less safe," Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement.

As we reported at the time, these shortages brought many industries to a standstill. The situation was so dire that many automakers, including Toyota, were forced to halt production until they could secure alternative supplies of essential semiconductors.

In addition to preventing such disruptions in the future, the US Commerce Department also sees the CHIPS Act as a way of alleviating US reliance on foreign chip fabs in the Asian Pacific amid worsening trade relations with China. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/16/ti_chips_act/