Partha Pande named to Washington’s CHIPS and Science Act working group

Indian American professor is considered a leader in Washington’s semiconductor industry with seminal contributions to Network-on-Chip research and education

By Arun Kumar

Partha Pande, Indian American interim dean of Washington State University’s Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture, has been named to the state’s CHIPS and Science Act working group.

The public-private working group was established earlier this year by Gov. Jay Inslee to coordinate a comprehensive, statewide approach to securing grant opportunities enabled by the federal bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act.

READ: Ankur Srivastava to lead semiconductor program at Maryland University (November 29th, 2024) 

Pande, professor and Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Engineering, is one of 11 members of the group announced by the Washington State Commerce Department who are considered leaders in the state’s semiconductor industry.

“The CHIPS and Science Act is an historic investment in science and technology across the country that will spur innovation in semiconductor technology while building our engineering and computer science workforce,” said Pande. “I’m excited to serve on this working group and to provide my expertise for the state of Washington in this important endeavor.”

The semiconductor industry currently generates $4.5 billion in economic impact statewide and employs nearly 8,600 people in Washington, according to the Department of Commerce.

With WSU since 2005, Pande conducts research in Network-on-Chip (NoC) technology, which is becoming the state-of-the art communications method for manycore chips.

The work could improve energy efficiency of data centers and other enterprises that require high-performance computers. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and earlier this year, was named to the Washington Academy of Sciences.

Researchers in WSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science conduct research in circuits and systems of chip design, designing heterogenous, many-core architectures in machine learning, bioinformatics, and high-performance computing.

In recent years, they have received grants from the Semiconductor Research Corporation, a technology-based consortium that includes more than 20 leading semiconductor companies, as well as from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and others.

In 2023, WSU became a founding partner of the Northwest University Semiconductor Network. Boise-based Micron Technology Inc, one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, established the partnership to develop the next generation of the US semiconductor industry workforce.