Junhua Xin
Butler County Community College, PA·Education Research
Computer chips, also called integrated circuits, run nearly every modern device. Demand for chips has jumped while supply has lagged, and the United States now makes less than 10% of the world's supply.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
- Topics
nanofabrication
semiconductor manufacturing
integrated circuits
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop a lab manual of low-cost, hands-on nanofabrication experiments that closely represent chipmaking industry methods, designed for community colleges that lack cleanrooms and fabrication equipment.
- Create instructor guides with student assessment rubrics to measure learning outcomes from the micro- and nanotechnology experiments in the manual.
- Have partnering community colleges review the manual and evaluate its experiments, then optimize and re-evaluate it before wider release.
- Disseminate the finished manual through national conferences and professional development activities so other colleges can launch chipmaking degree tracks.
More about the research
Training more chipmaking technicians is one way to close that gap. The problem is that the usual training needs cleanrooms and expensive fabrication tools, which most community colleges do not have.
Why it matters
The semiconductor sector supports roughly 250,000 US jobs and matters for economic and national security, yet it lacks enough trained technicians. A low-cost nanofabrication manual could let community colleges without cleanrooms train these technicians. Students in regions with local chip industries would gain hands-on preparation, and employers would gain access to a larger workforce.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Ross Stites
Kansas City Kansas Community College, KS·Education Research
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The school
Butler County Community College: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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