SUNY Poly training program seeks behind-the-scenes workers from all walks of life – Times Union

ALBANY - Michael Fancher has spent his career in the semiconductor industry trying to figure out how to bridge the "valley of death."

That's a metaphor for the major hurdles that await technologists and inventors trying to bring their products to market. Those pitfalls often involve getting start-up funding or late-stage capital needed to begin volume manufacturing.

Fancher works at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany where he is director of the school's Advanced Manufacturing Performance, or AMP Center. He is also director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Nanomaterials and Nanoelectronics, which is also at SUNY Poly.

He is working these days on bridging the workforce gap for New York's growing semiconductor economy through a new training program called the Career Alignment Platform, or CAP.

CAP is designed as an open house employment platform - a place where anyone from anywhere, from those living in disadvantaged communities, to trade workers and factory workers, can explore jobs of the future.

Are these jobs out there?

They are and there will be more.

GlobalFoundries is expanding its Fab 8 campus to add a second computer chip factory. Wolfspeed just opened its new fab outside Utica - and Micron Technology, the largest memory chip maker in the U.S. just announced it plans to spend $100 billion to build a massive chip factory in the Syracuse suburb of Clay.

Fancher says he imagines a plumber driving by Fab 8 or reading about it in the news and wondering: 'What if?'

"Is there a job up there for a plumber?" Fancher says. "How do I find out? Who do I call? What does that job look like? That is what CAP is designed to do." How are they going to feel there is a place for them within this enterprise from a workforce training perspective?"

At the Albany Nanotech campus on Fuller Road, where SUNY Poly is a major tenant, Fancher works with Maxwell Lippitt, senior project engineer for the AMP Center, on designing and building CAP.

They stress that the jobs they are training people for are not the cleanroom jobs that often dominate photos used in news stories about computer chip factories.

Instead they are training people for computer chip factory facilities jobs that are for people who are trained to operate the machines above and below the actual cleanroom, including the so-called sub-fab that is located below the cleanroom that feeds gases and chemicals to the machines that process the silicon wafers that are eventually cut up into individual chips.

Fancher, Lippitt and others have assembled decommissioned sub-fab machines alongside large video screens that broadcast tutorials on different aspects of the manufacturing process. Virtual and augmented reality is used in training, what Fancher calls the "gamification" of worker training.

"You can use animation to show particles of gas flowing through the tool," Fancher said. "We're going to continue to do more of this, but we're not going to do it all by ourselves. We're going to do it in partnership with industrial partners, so they get to use it, and we get to use it and the industry gets to use it."

CAP will pull workers from all walks of life. From community colleges, from factories, from small businesses. From the unemployment line.

And it will be key because the semiconductor industry is growing so quickly in upstate New York. Micron in Clay will need 9,000 workers, but the supply chain that will be required for the factory will employ 41,000 people with vendors and support jobs.

That is a big ask for upstate New York, which has only been a semiconductor manufacturing center now for about a decade when Fab 8 was built.

"Together, we are leveraging this investment the largest private-sector investment in state history to secure our economic future, solidify New York's standing as a global manufacturing hub, and usher the state into another industrial revolution," Gov. Kathy Hochul said when the Micron deal was announced on Oct. 4.

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SUNY Poly training program seeks behind-the-scenes workers from all walks of life - Times Union