[Ground-station] Del Mar Electronics Show Day 2 (STEM, CHIPS)

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings all,

Wrapped up the day yesterday at the Del Mar Electronics and Manufacturing
Show with a long talk about students and STEM with a local education
director.

Some familiar themes cropped up. There is a high degree of difficulty
getting practical arts and applied mathematics represented in
curriculum (with respect to the United States), and difficulty in finding
qualified volunteers. There is a new industry initiative in San Diego and
it looks like some good (fully funded) things will happen over the next
year.

I stuck up for open source digital radio as an excellent
educational framework and we talked about a few specific examples of
successful high school and summer engineering programs in San Diego. I
answered questions about how the "learn to solder" activities from the San
Diego Makers Guild had gone down in the past. In short, these events ended
up being canceled because of liability and insurance concerns despite being
initially invited by and valued by the school.

I had a long conversation about the CHIPS act and some specifics of the
legislation with someone with first-hand knowledge of the process. IEEE was
heavily involved in writing it and that involvement managed to dramatically
broaden the scope of the bill from benefiting a relatively small number of
PhDs to more of a workforce and infrastructure development spend.

As originally drafted it would have been very narrowly defined. Even after
substantial input and changes, it will take a lot of work to get funding to
a broad enough swath of the workforce to make the sort of differences that
are expected. R&D spending in the US has increased steadily since 2008 and
was 3% of GDP as of 2019. This should go up more with CHIPS, but there's
additional incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act with an expansion of
the payroll tax credit.

Both of these legislative acts focus on commercial industry R&D. All of
this spending helps open source efforts like ours only if we can show that
the value of open source lines up with the stated purposes for the spending
in these bills. Speaking up wherever we can (IWRC for example) for open
source FPGA/ASIC efforts, toolchains, and broader designer involvement, has
tremendous potential to improve things long-term. However, as we all know,
advocacy is a lengthy and difficult process.

If you can recommend a potential author or speaker that might be interested
in writing a paper or giving a talk for IWRC2023 about open source
FPGA/ASICs please let me know.

-Michelle Thompson
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openresearch.institute/pipermail/ground-station-openresearch.institute/attachments/20230428/2877adaa/attachment.htm>