The National Science Foundation awarded FuzeHub-led Upstate Makes a $1 million “NSF Regional Innovation Engines Development Award” to further catalyze robust partnerships and align our materials innovation ecosystem with critical regional opportunities.
NSF Engines aspire to catalyze robust partnerships to positively impact the economy within a geographic region, address societal challenges, advance national competitiveness and create local, high-wage jobs.
Upstate New York benefits from an existing ecosystem of partners advancing regional innovation in advanced materials, characterized by millions of dollars of annual public investment and billions of dollars in annual private investment.
Our region has double the chips manufacturing employment concentration vis-a-vis national patterns (location quotient 2.0), with multiple state-of-the-art fabs, exceptional semiconductor patent activity, leading expertise at several universities that were involved in the industry’s creation and growth, and world-class shared R&D assets at NY CREATES’ Albany NanoTech Complex.
Upstate Makes’ partners include leading private and public research institutions that together constitute one of the world’s most powerful materials science labs, a set of complementary capabilities distributed across our region of service.
The State of New York has made extensive and continuous investments in the region’s nanotechnology, semiconductor, microelectronics, and integrated photonics industries. These include NY CREATES Albany NanoTech Complex, the largest and most advanced publicly-owned semiconductor R&D facility in North America and home to the world’s only open access 300mm R&D facility. The State has also invested in longstanding Centers for Excellence and Centers for Advanced Technology; the Test, Assembly, and Packaging (TAP) facility at AIM Photonics; high-tech manufacturing mega-site development; and a first-in-the-nation Green CHIPS program.