2025-12-21 22:00:01
IEEE Spectrum’s most popular biomedical stories of the last year centered both on incorporating new technologies and revamping old ones. While AI is all the rage in most sectors—including biomed, with applications like an in-brain warning system for worsening mental health and a model to estimate heart rate in real time—biomedical news this past year has also focused on legacy technologies. Tech like Wi-Fi, ultrasound, and lasers have all made comebacks or found new uses in 2025.
Whether innovation stems from new tech or old, IEEE Spectrum will continue to cover it rigorously in 2026.
Georgia Institute of Technology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and TeraPixel
When Patricio Riva Posse, a psychiatrist at Emory University School of Medicine, realized that his patient’s brain implants were sending him signals about her worsening depression before she even recognized anything was wrong, he wished he could have taken action sooner.
That experience led him and colleagues to develop “an automatic alarm system” for signs of changing mental health. The tool monitors brain signals in real time, using implants to record electrical impulses, and AI to analyze the outputs and flag warning signs of relapse. Other research groups across the United States are experimenting with different ways to use these stimulating brain implants to help treat depression, both with and without the help of AI. “There are so many levers we can press here,” neurosurgeon Nir Lipsman says in the article.
Dmitry Kireev/University of Massachusetts Amherst
In Dmitry Kireev’s lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, researchers are developing imperceptibly thin graphene tattoos capable of monitoring your vital signs and more. “Electronic tattoos could help people track complex medical conditions, including cardiovascular, metabolic, immune system, and neurodegenerative diseases. Almost half of U.S. adults may be in the early stages of one or more of these disorders right now, although they don’t yet know it,” he wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum.
How does it work? Graphene is conductive, strong, and flexible, able to measure features like heart rate and the presence of certain compounds in sweat. For now, the tattoos need to be plugged into a regular electronic circuit, but Kireev hopes that they will soon be integrated into smartwatches, and thus simpler to wear.
Erika Cardema/UC Santa Cruz
Wi-Fi can do more than just get you connected to the internet—it can help monitor your heart inexpensively and without requiring constant physical contact. The new approach, called Pulse-Fi, uses an AI model to analyze heartbeats to estimate heart rate in real time from up to 10 feet away.
The system is low cost, totaling around US $40, easy to deploy, and doesn’t introduce discomfort. It also works regardless of the user’s posture and in all kinds of environments. Katia Obraczka, a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who led the development of Pulse-Fi, says the team plans to commercialize the technology.
Shonagh Rae
Sangeeta S. Chavan and Stavros Zanos, biomedical researchers at the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine in New York, hypothesize that ultrasound waves may activate neurons, offering “a precise and safe way to provide healing treatments for a wide range of both acute and chronic maladies,” as they write in an article for Spectrum. Targeted ultrasound could then serve as a treatment for inflammation or diabetes, instead of medication with wide-ranging side effects, they say.
It works by vibrating a neuron’s membrane and “opening channels that allow ions to flow into the cell, thus indirectly changing the cell’s voltage and causing it to fire,” they write. The authors think that activating specific neurons can help address the root causes of specific illnesses.
Extreme Light group/University of Glasgow
If a doctor wants to see inside your head, they have to decide whether they want to do so cheaply or deeply—an electroencephalograph is inexpensive, but doesn’t penetrate past the outer layers of the brain, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is expensive, but can see all the way in. Shining a laser through a person’s head seems like the first step towards technology that accomplishes both.
For many years, this kind of work has seemed impossible because the human head is so good at blocking light, but researchers have now proven that lasers can send photons all the way through. “What was thought impossible, we’ve shown to be possible. And hopefully…that could inspire the next generation of these devices,” project lead Jack Radford says in the article.
Jiawei Ge
In the not-to-distant future, surgical patients may hear “The robot will see you now,” as the authors of this story suggest. The three researchers work at the Johns Hopkins University robotics lab responsible for developing Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which performed the first autonomous soft-tissue surgery in a live animal in 2016.
While there are certainly challenges remaining in the quest to bring autonomous robots into the operating room—like developing general purpose robotic controllers and collecting data within strict privacy regulations—the end goal is on the horizon. “A scenario in which patients are routinely greeted by a surgeon and an autonomous robotic assistant is no longer a distant possibility,” the authors write.
2025-12-21 21:00:01
This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier, and it lives permanently inside the dome’s system to serve an eco-friendly purpose: to store large amounts of excess renewable energy until it’s needed.
Developed by the Milan-based company Energy Dome, the bubble and its surrounding machinery demonstrate a first-of-its-kind “CO2 Battery,” as the company calls it. The facility compresses and expands CO2 daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours. And in 2026, replicas of this plant will start popping up across the globe.
We mean that literally. It takes just half a day to inflate the bubble. The rest of the facility takes less than two years to build and can be done just about anywhere there’s 5 hectares of flat land.
The first to build one outside of Sardinia will be one of India’s largest power companies, NTPC Limited. The company expects to complete its CO2 Battery sometime in 2026 at the Kudgi power plant in Karnataka, in India. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the public utility Alliant Energy received the all clear from authorities to begin construction of one in 2026 to supply power to 18,000 homes.
And Google likes the concept so much that it plans to rapidly deploy the facilities in all of its key data-center locations in Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific region. The idea is to provide electricity-guzzling data centers with round-the-clock clean energy, even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. The partnership with Energy Dome, announced in July, marked Google’s first investment in long-duration energy storage.
“We’ve been scanning the globe seeking different solutions,” says Ainhoa Anda, Google’s senior lead for energy strategy, in Paris. The challenge the tech giant has encountered is not only finding a long-duration storage option, but also one that works with the unique specs of every region. “So standardization is really important, and this is one of the aspects that we really like” about Energy Dome, she says. “They can really plug and play this.”
Google will prioritize placing the Energy Dome facilities where they’ll have the most impact on decarbonization and grid reliability, and where there’s a lot of renewable energy to store, Anda says. The facilities can be placed adjacent to Google’s data centers or elsewhere within the same grid. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.
Anda says Google expects to help the technology “reach a massive commercial stage.”
All this excitement is based on Energy Dome’s one full-size, grid-connected plant in Ottana, Sardinia, which was completed in July. It was built to help solve one of the energy transition’s biggest challenges: the need for grid-scale storage that can provide power for more than 8 hours at a time. Called long-duration energy storage, or LDES in industry parlance, the concept is the key to maximizing the value of renewable energy.
When sun and wind are abundant, solar and wind farms tend to produce more electricity than a grid needs. So storing the excess for use when these resources are scarce just makes sense. LDES also makes the grid more reliable by providing backup and supplementary power.
The problem is that even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage. That’s not long enough to power through a whole night, or multiple cloudy and windless days, or the hottest week of the year, when energy demand hits its peak.
After the CO2 leaves the dome, it is compressed, cooled, reduced to a liquid, and stored in pressure vessels. To release the energy, the process reverses: The liquid is evaporated, heated, expanded, and then fed through a turbine that generates electricity. Luigi Avantaggiato
Lithium-ion battery systems could be increased in size to store more and last longer, but systems of that size usually aren’t economically viable. Other grid-scale battery chemistries and approaches are in development, such as sodium-based, iron-air, and vanadium redox flow batteries. But the energy density, costs, degradation, and funding complications have challenged the developers of those alternatives.
Researchers have also experimented with storing energy by compressing air, heating up blocks or sand, using hydrogen or methanol, pressurizing water deep underground, and even dangling heavy objects in the air and dropping them. (The creativity devoted to LDES is impressive.) But geologic constraints, economic viability, efficiency, and scalability have hindered the commercialization of these strategies.
The tried-and-true grid-scale storage option—pumped hydro, in which water is pumped between reservoirs at different elevations—lasts for decades and can store thousands of megawatts for days. But these systems require specific topography, a lot of land, and can take up to a decade to build.
CO2 Batteries check a lot of boxes that other approaches don’t. They don’t need special topography like pumped-hydro reservoirs do. They don’t need critical minerals like electrochemical and other batteries do. They use components for which supply chains already exist. Their expected lifetime stretches nearly three times as long as lithium-ion batteries. And adding size and storage capacity to them significantly decreases cost per kilowatt-hour. Energy Dome expects its LDES solution to be 30 percent cheaper than lithium-ion.
China has taken note. China Huadian Corp. and Dongfang Electric Corp. are reportedly building a CO2-based energy-storage facility in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW. The Chinese companies did not respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests for information.
“What I can say is that they are developing something very, very similar [to Energy Dome’s CO2 Battery] but quite large in scale,” says Claudio Spadacini, Energy Dome’s founder and CEO. The Chinese companies “are good, they are super fast, and they have a lot of money,” he says.
When I visited Energy Dome’s Sardinia facility in October, the CO2 had just been pumped out of the dome, so I was able to peek inside. It was massive, monochromatic, and pretty much empty. The inner membrane, which had been holding the uncompressed CO2, had collapsed across the entire floor. A few pockets of the gas remained, making the off-white sheet billow up in spots.
Meanwhile, the translucent outer dome allowed some daylight to pass through, creating a creamy glow that enveloped the vast space. With no structural framing, the only thing keeping the dome upright was the small difference in pressure between the inside and outside air.
“This is incredible,” I said to my guide, Mario Torchio, Energy Dome’s global marketing and communications director.
“It is. But it’s physics,” he said.
Outside the dome, a series of machines connected by undulating pipes moves the CO2 out of the dome for compressing and condensing. First, a compressor pressurizes the gas from 1 bar (100,000 pascals) to about 55 bar (5,500,000 pa). Next, a thermal-energy-storage system cools the CO2 to an ambient temperature. Then a condenser reduces it into a liquid that is stored in a few dozen pressure vessels, each about the size of a school bus. The whole process takes about 10 hours, and at the end of it, the battery is considered charged.
To discharge the battery, the process reverses. The liquid CO2 is evaporated and heated. It then enters a gas-expander turbine, which is like a medium-pressure steam turbine. This drives a synchronous generator, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy for the grid. After that, the gas is exhausted at ambient pressure back into the dome, filling it up to await the next charging phase.
Energy Dome engineers inspect the dryer system, which keeps the gaseous CO₂ in the dome at optimal dryness levels at all times.Luigi Avantaggiato
It’s not rocket science. Still, someone had to be the first to put it together and figure out how to do it cost-effectively, which Spadacini says his company has accomplished and patented. “How we seal the turbo machinery, how we store the heat in the thermal-energy storage, how we store the heat after condensing…can really cut costs and increase the efficiency,” he says.
The company uses pure, purpose-made CO2 instead of sourcing it from emissions or the air, because those sources come with impurities and moisture that degrade the steel in the machinery.
On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.
And what if a tornado comes? Spadacini says the dome can withstand wind up to 160 kilometers per hour. If Energy Dome can get half a day’s warning of severe weather, the company can just compress and store the CO2 in the tanks and then deflate the outer dome, he says.
If the worst happens and the dome is punctured, 2,000 tonnes of CO2 will enter the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 15 round-trip flights between New York and London on a Boeing 777. “It’s negligible compared to the emissions of a coal plant,” Spadacini says. People will also need to stay back 70 meters or more until the air clears, he says.
Worth the risk? The companies lining up to build these systems seem to think so.
2025-12-20 05:14:17
Achieve accurate RCS predictions for electrically large aerospace structures in minutes instead ofhours using advanced approximation techniques on standard desktop hardware.
What Attendees will Learn
2025-12-20 03:00:02
Demand for electricity is up in the United States, and so is its price. One way to increase supply and lower costs is to build new power plants, but that can take years and cost a fortune. Talgat Kopzhanov is working on a faster, more affordable solution: the generator replacement interconnection process.
The technique links renewable energy sources to the grid connections of shuttered or underutilized power facilities and coal plants. The process uses the existing interconnection rights and infrastructure when generating electricity, eliminating the years-long approval process for constructing new U.S. power facilities.
Employer
Middle River Power, in Chicago
Job title
Asset manager
Member grade
Senior member
Alma maters
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and Indiana University in Bloomington
Kopzhanov, an IEEE senior member, is an asset manager for Middle River Power, based in Chicago. The private equity–sponsored investment and asset management organization specializes in U.S. power generation assets.
“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights,” he says, “but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.” Interconnection rights give a new power source—such as solar energy—permission to connect to a high-voltage transmission system.
“We build the new renewable energy resources on top of them,” Kopzhanov says. “It’s like colocating a new power plant.”
He recently oversaw the installation of two generator-replacement interconnection projects, one for a solar system in Minnesota and the other for a battery storage facility in California.
Artificial intelligence data centers are driving up demand and raising electricity bills globally. Although tech companies and investors are willing to spend trillions of U.S. dollars constructing new power facilities, it can take up to seven years just to secure the grid interconnection rights needed to start building a plant, Kopzhanov says. The lengthy process involves system planning, permit requests, and regulatory approvals. Only about 5 percent of new projects are approved each year, he says, in part because of grid reliability issues.
The interconnection technique takes about half the time, he says, bringing cleaner energy online faster. By overcoming interconnection bottlenecks, such as major transmission upgrades that delay renewable projects, the process speeds up project timelines and lowers expenses.
If you want to work in a secure, recession-proof industry, consider a career in power engineering, Kopzhanov says—especially in an unstable job market, when even Amazon, Microsoft, and other large companies are laying off thousands of engineers.
The power industry desperately needs engineers. The global power sector will require between 450,000 and 1.5 million more engineers by 2030 to build, implement, and operate energy infrastructure, according to an IEEE Spectrum article based on a study conducted this year of the power engineering workforce by the IEEE Power & Energy Society.
One of the reasons for the shortage, Kopzhanov says, is that the power sector doesn’t seem exciting to young engineers.
“It has not been popular because the technologies we’re implementing nowadays were invented quite a long time ago,” he says. “So there were not too many recent innovations.”
But with new technologies being introduced, such as the generator replacement interconnection process, now is a great time to get into the industry, he says.
“We are facing lots of different kinds of interesting and big challenges, and we definitely need power engineers who can solve them, such as the supply and demand situation facing us,” he says. “We need right-minded people who can deal with that.
“Until this point, the marvelous engineering systems that have been designed and built with close to 100-percent reliability are not going to be the case moving forward, so we have to come up with innovative approaches.”
Just because you have a power engineering degree, however, doesn’t mean you have to work as a power engineer, he says.
“Most students might assume they will have to dedicate themselves to only being a power engineer for the rest of their life—which is not the case,” he says. “You can be on the business side or be an asset manager like me.
“The power sector is an extremely dynamic and vast area. You’ll have many paths to pursue along your career journey.”
Kopzhanov explains the technique in an on-demand educational webinar, Unlocking Surplus Interconnection Service. Colocating Renewable and Thermal Power Plants, hosted by the IEEE Power & Energy Society. The webinar is available to the public for a fee.
Kopzhanov has been involved with several recent generator replacement interconnection installations. In May the Sherco Solar project in Sherburne County, Minn., replaced a retiring coal plant with approximately 720 megawatts of solar-powered generators, making it the largest solar-generating facility in the region. The first 460 MW of capacity is expected to be operational soon.
Another new project, developed with Middle River, is a battery system installed in April at California’s Hanford Hybrid Energy Center, a natural gas reliability facility. It used existing and incremental interconnection capacity to add the storage system. The surplus renewable energy from the batteries will be used during peak times to reduce the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Silicon Valley Clean Energy article about the installation.
“These projects are uniquely positioned to be colocated with existing power plants,” Kopzhanov says. “But, at the same time, they are renewable and sustainable sources of power—which is also helping to decarbonize the environment and meet the emission-reduction goals of the state.”
Born and raised in Taraz, Kazakhstan, Kopzhanov was surrounded by relatives who worked in the power industry. It’s not surprising that he has pursued a career in the field.
Until 1991, when the country was still a Soviet republic, most Kazakhs were required to help build the country’s power and transmission systems, he says. His mother and father are chemical engineers, and his grandfather was involved in the power industry. They told him about how they designed the transformers and overhead power lines. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be an engineer too, he says.
Today the Central Asian country is a major producer of oil, gas, and coal.
Kopzhanov left Kazakhstan in 2008 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind.
After graduating in 2012, he was hired as an electrical design engineer by Fluor Corp. in Farnborough, England. He oversaw the development of a master plan for a power project there. He also engineered and designed high-voltage switchgears, substations, and transformers.
“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.”
In 2015 he joined ExxonMobil in Houston, working as a project manager. During his six years there, he held managerial positions. Eventually, he was promoted to asset advisor and was responsible for evaluating the feasibility of investing in decarbonization and electrification projects by identifying their risks and opportunities.
He decided he wanted to learn more about the business aspects of running a company, so he left in 2021 to pursue an MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, in Bloomington. During his MBA program, he briefly worked as a consultant for a lithium-ion manufacturing firm, offering advice on the viability of their proposed projects and investments.
“Engineers aren’t typically connected to the business world,” he says, “but having an understanding of what the needs are and tailoring your future goals toward that is extremely important. In my view, that’s how you’ll become a great technical expert. I definitely recommend that engineers have some kind of understanding of the business side.”
He joined Middle River shortly after graduating from Indiana with his MBA in 2023.
Kopzhanov was introduced to IEEE by a colleague at ExxonMobil after he asked the member about an IEEE plaque displayed on his desk. The coworker explained the activities he was involved in, as well as the process for joining. Kopzhanov became a member in 2019, left, and then rejoined in 2023.
“That was one of the best decisions I have made,” he says.
A member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society, he says its publications, webinars, conferences, and networking events keep him current on new developments.
“Being able to follow what’s happening in the industry, especially in the space where you’re working, is something that has benefited me a lot,” he says.
An active IEEE volunteer, he is the founding chair of the Power & Energy Society’s Chicago chapter, which has about 400 members. He is on the chapter’s executive committee, and he helps organize conferences, update the website, and review research papers.
“It’s those little things that have a significant impact,” he says. “Volunteering is a key piece of belonging to IEEE.”
2025-12-20 00:30:02
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Happy Holidays from FZI Living Lab!
[ FZI ]
Thanks, Georg!
Happy Holidays from Norlab!
I should get a poutine...
[ Norlab ]
Happy Holidays from Fraunhofer IOSB!
[ Fraunhofer ]
Thanks, Janko!
Happy Holidays from HEBI Robotics!
[ HEBI Robotics ]
Thanks, Trevor!
Happy Holidays from the Learning Systems and Robotics Lab!
[ Learning Systems and Robotics Lab ]
Happy Holidays from Toyota Research Institute!
Happy Holidays from Clearpath Robotics!
Happy AI Holidays from Robotnik!
[ Robotnik ]
Happy AI Holidays from ABB Robotics!
[ ABB Robotics ]
With its unique modular configuration, TRON 2 lets you freely configure dual-arm, bipedal, or wheeled setups to fit your mission.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Thanks, Jinyan!
I love this robot, but can someone please explain why what happens at 2:00 makes me physically uncomfortable?
[ Paper ]
Thanks, Ayato!
This robot, REWW-ARM, is a remote wire-driven mobile robot that separates and excludes electronics from the mobile part, so that the mobile robot can operate in harsh environments. A novel transmission mechanism enables efficient and long-distance electronics-free power transmission, closed-loop control that estimates the distal state from wire. It demonstrated locomotion and manipulation on land and underwater.
[ JSK Lab ]
Thanks, Takahiro!
DEEP Robotics has deployed China’s first robot dog patrol team for forest fire protection in the West Lake area. Powered by embodied AI, these quadruped robots support early detection, patrol, and risk monitoring—using technology to protect nature and strengthen emergency response.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
In this video we show how we trained our robot to fold a towel from start to finish. Folding a towel might seem simple, but for a robot it means solving perception, planning, and dexterous manipulation all at once, especially when dealing with soft, deformable fabric. We walk through how the system sees the towel, identifies key features, and executes each fold autonomously.
[ Kinisi Robotics ]
This may be the first humanoid app store, but it’s far from the first app store for robots. Problem is, for an app store to gain traction, there needs to be a platform out there that people will buy for its core functionality first.
[ Unitree ]
You can tell that this isn’t U.S. government–funded research because it involves a robot fetching drinks.
[ Flexiv ]
This video shows the Perseverance Mars Rover’s point of view during a record-breaking drive that occurred June 19, 2025, the 1,540th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The Perseverance rover was traveling northbound and covered 1,350.7 feet (411.7 meters) on that sol, over the course of about 4 hours and 24 minutes. This distance eclipsed its previous record of distance traveled in a single sol: 1,140.7 feet (347.7 meters), which was achieved on April 3, 2023 (Sol 753).
[ NASA ]
Automation is what’s helped keep lock maker Wilson Bohannan based in America for more than 150 years while all of its competitors relocated overseas. Using two high-speed and high-precision FANUC M-10 series robots, Acme developed a simple but highly sophisticated system that uses innovative end-of-arm tooling to accommodate 18 different styles of padlocks. As a result of Acme’s new system using FANUC robots, Wilson Bohannan production rocketed from 1,500-1,800 locks finished per eight-hour shift to more than 5,000.
[ Fanuc ]
In this conversation, Zack Jackowski, general manager and vice president, Atlas, and Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior, sit down to discuss the path to generalist humanoid robots working at scale and how we approach research & development to both push the boundaries of the industry and deliver valuable applications.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
2025-12-18 21:00:02
The head of a U.S. CHIPS and Science Act-funded center devoted to digital twins for chip manufacturing has informed its 121 members that the U.S. Department of Commerce will terminate its US $285-million five-year contract.
According to its website, the SMART USA Institute has the goal of uniting academic and industrial labs to create “virtual manufacturing replicas” that reduce development and manufacturing costs by more than 35 percent, cut manufacturing development time by 30 percent, and improve manufacturing yields by 40 percent. It also aimed to train 110,000 workers over five years. This is the second CHIPS Act related institution to be defunded by the federal government since the second Trump administration began in January 2025.
SMART stands for “semiconductor manufacturing and advanced research with twins”, and the organization began life when it won a government contract in January 2025. It has a complicated structure. The organization is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., and it is part of a network of federally-sponsored manufacturing innovation institutes called Manufacturing USA, which predates the CHIPS Act. SMART is a public-private partnership operated by SRC Manufacturing Consortium Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). Established in 1982, and backed by the semiconductor industry, SRC funds R&D at universities and has sponsored more than 15,000 students.
According to an email dated 12 December, sent to SMART USA participants, and obtained by IEEE Spectrum, Commerce notified the organization of the termination on 10 December. The funds were withdrawn “for convenience,” an option that allows the government to unilaterally withdraw from an agreement that is written into many federal contracts, the email states. Requests for comment from the Commerce Department were not returned by press time.
“Although DOC acknowledged that we built an effective organization and met all performance targets, the administration has chosen not to support R&D and workforce development in this direction,” Todd Younkin, SMART USA’s executive director and the CEO of SRC, wrote in the email.
Details of what happens next are still coming, but Younkin wrote that the organization would hold a Q&A webinar on Wednesday 17 December to answer member questions.
“While this is a setback, it doesn’t diminish the importance of the work or the strength of our shared commitment to advancing leadership in microelectronics and advanced packaging,” he wrote in the email. He added that SRC will continue to fund research through its other programs.
In response to IEEE Spectrum’s questions, Younkin’s office confirmed that the email was genuine.
Younkin reiterated that SMART USA had met its performance targets, and that the organization’s performance was not the reason for the move. The organization added that it is “coordinating a responsible transition with [the Commerce Department] and members.”
Regarding SRC, Younkin stated: “While this transition is challenging, it does not define our future. We have united the semiconductor community for decades, and will continue to do so. SRC will continue to drive industry-led innovation, fostering strong ecosystems and collaborations. That includes empowerment of the next generation of semiconductor professionals, who must deliver the next era of compute and communications. Together, we will turn this moment into momentum.”
In a statement, David N. Henshall, chief operations officer for SMART USA, and senior vice-president for SRC, said: “Federal contracting decisions evolve over time, and ‘termination for convenience’ is an established mechanism in those agreements and is not a reflection of the significant work we were doing. What’s clear is the industry’s continued need: the challenges in microelectronics and advanced packaging remain, and SRC’s programs provide a durable path forward for collaborative R&D and talent.”
“NIST has a reputation as a neutral and steadfast partner that can work with any industry and academic organization. This reputation is very much at risk”—Zoe Lofgren and Haley Stevens, House of Representatives Committee on Science Space, and Technology
The addition of SMART USA to SRC’s portfolio led to some disruption, according to an academic participant who did not wish to be named. This scientist’s three-year, $450,000 proposal had been accepted for funding in 2025, 2026, and 2027 under SRC’s Global Research Collaboration program. But, early in 2025, years two and three of the grant were canceled and the scientist was invited to apply to SMART USA instead.
The new program required expanding the scope of the project, boosting the number of academic participants, and seeking participation and funding from SMART USA members. He joined up with researchers from eight other universities and a chipmaking equipment firm, then spent the summer writing a new proposal and trying to get SMART USA industry members on board. By August, “we were not able to secure enough funding commitments from SMART USA members to even submit,” he said, adding that many of the SRC member companies that the group had been working with had not joined SMART USA by the time of submission, and those that had seemed to be putting in very little cash into the effort.
The withdrawal of funding from SMART USA echoes an earlier move that withdrew $7.4 billion from Natcast, the public-private partnership set up to run the National Semiconductor Technology Center, the CHIPS Act’s main R&D effort.
However, the two events are starkly different in tone and publicity. Commerce has so far made no public statement about SMART USA. But in a public letter announcing the withdrawal of funds from Natcast, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick implied impropriety on the part of organization, its CEO—IEEE Frederik Philips Award winner Dierdre Hanford—and other experts involved in its creation. Within weeks, Natcast was forced to lay off the majority of its staff and has now folded.
In a letter to Craig Burkhardt, Acting Undersecretary of Commerce for standards and technology, date 17 December, two members of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology questioned the move to defund SMART USA.
California Democrat Zoe Lofgren and Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens “question the Department’s recent decisions to halt or delay semiconductor research and development (R&D) programs and awards authorized by Congress, and break existing obligations to industry and academia.”
The lawmakers worry that these moves cause long term harm to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), the agency within Commerce that implements the CHIPS Act. “NIST has a reputation as a neutral and steadfast partner that can work with any industry and academic organization,” they write. “This reputation is very much at risk. Few companies would willingly seek partnership with an organization that cancels its obligation on a whim.”
The letter then went on to criticize NIST’s solicitation of R&D proposals made in September in the wake of the destruction of Natcast. “NIST seems to have pivoted its model to that of an investment accelerator or venture capital fund, funding riskier research in exchange for intellectual property and equity,” they write. “While there is a time and place for the venture capital model, especially in the private sector, dedicating the entire CHIPS R&D program to it would unquestionably fail to meet the clear text and intent of the CHIPS Act.”