U.S. Senate Passes Innovation Act to Support U.S. Semiconductor Manufacturing Sector

On February 8, 2022, the European Commission formally proposed what's commonly referred to as the European Chips Act. The legislation plans to build on Europe's strengths and address weaknesses to develop a thriving domestic semiconductor ecosystem and resilient supply chain, while setting measures to anticipate and respond to future supply chain disruptions. In the short term, the Act seeks to bolster EU capabilities to anticipate future chips crises, strengthen manufacturing activities in the EU, and support scale-up and innovation across the whole value chain. In the mid- to long-term, it seeks to reinforce Europe's technological leadership while developing mechanisms to support transfer of knowledge from the lab to the fab and position Europe as a technology leader in innovative downstream markets.

Using biological building blocks in place of traditional materials to assemble computers has been a research topic for many years, but recently the first potential commercial use cases have begun to emerge, centered on storage for large data sets. The DNA Storage Alliance, created to promote a storage ecosystem based on synthesized DNA strands, recently shared their aspirations for the emerging technology that offers significant promise in durability, simplicity, cost, and density over traditional magnetic counterparts. The initial goals of the alliance are to educate the public and raise awareness about DNA-based storage. Further out, the alliance may pursue the creation of specifications and standards, such as encoding, physical interfaces, retention, and file systems, to ensure that DNA-based solutions complement existing storage hierarchies. The alliance notes that expectations for the growth rate of current storage mechanisms cannot keep pace with the rising demand for data storage, particularly where growing data retention and related data mining efforts are driving the need to save increasingly larger data sets for longer periods of time. Such requirements are well suited to DNA-based archive storage characteristics in applications including digital content creation, robotics, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, astronomy, and climate science.