Subramanian Iyer, an electrical engineer and educator, has long specialized in a sleepy niche of the semiconductor industry that has now become a major choke point in the global contest for artificial intelligence leadership.
That niche is a technology called advanced chip packaging, which bundles as many as dozens of the components in palm-size modules. As computing gains from the traditional practice of shrinking transistors to pack more of them onto each chip have diminished, Nvidia and other chip giants have turned to packaging as an essential way to deliver semiconductors capable of more complex tasks for AI.
Iyer, 72, a former IBM technologist and now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has helped drive packaging advances over decades. But he and chip industry executives have watched in alarm as U.S. leadership in the field has slipped away to the same company that dominates advanced chip manufacturing.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes cutting-edge chips for Nvidia and other AI leaders, also packages nearly all of them. Its key suppliers and partners are mainly in Taiwan, too, facing the same threat from China that caused U.S. policymakers to funnel billions of dollars into boosting domestic chip fabrication.
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