This seems like good marketing but reading this press release and looking at the courses in their degree program I feel like I'm missing what's different here (other than some reference to supply chain management). Most of the coursework here seems to be very similar to what was available over a decade ago at the state university I attended for graduate school (my concentration was semiconductor device theory related…
Help me understand, are you saying this is purely smoke and mirrors or just nothing fundamentally new? As a semiconductor lay-person, my expectation is that this course would really just be an organized curriculum around semiconductors, and if you completed it you'd be hopefully competitive getting a job at Intel/Qualcom/etc. I am not expecting them to be providing any fundamentally novel approaches to semiconductor…
What I mean is just that the announcement seems to be more of a branding exercise than a fundamental shift in what's included in a degree program. If you look at what they describe as the curriculum for example: undergrad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/semiconductors/degrees grad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/online/programs/masters-degre... These types of courses are very common among most curriculum I've seen as are many of the things they're offering (e.g. have a design fabricated something universities have done through MOSIS for quite some time or time in a university research fab which many schools have also had.
The positioning in the article seems to be highlighting the growing need for fab-type engineers though and I think that's not quite a match for what's on offer here. If you want to do very fundamental semiconductor device work like designing new device types or fabrication techniques there are some jobs in this but they do typically require a graduate education likely a PhD and are much more limited. If the construction of new fabs is what they are saying drives the need for a bigger wider program what is actually needed isn't device designers and engineers its tool owners, process managers, technicians/operators etc.
In semiconductors I'd say things are divided kind of between 1. Front End Design (Digital+Architecture and Analog) where the better and more plentiful jobs are (with more in the digital side) 2. Backend (timing closure, placement and routing, final simulations etc) 3. Process Design If I was trying to make an analogy to more software like roles, the manufacturing + backend folks are people running the build process, the process designers are a small library designing team and the frontend design teams are the bulk of the folks using all of the above to implement chip designs. You can get into the analog and digital design side with an EE masters in VLSI from most programs.
The programs Purdue offers can definitely get you into any of these types of role depending on what you do or are interested in, but what they're talking about in this writeup doesn't seem like a fundamental shift. If the goal was something more industry focused I could see perhaps creating a bunch of new courses or co-ops focusing on more industrial concerns (DFT/DFM, process management, simulating for non-idealities etc). I don't see the curriculum being wildly different in a way that things wouldn't slot into the more traditional roles at all. I don't think this is a bad thing, I just think this announcement is a bit more on the marketing side letting people know this is available.
As far as the provide truly novel techniques, I think there are plenty of those being designed for various special purposes in universities. Sometimes these designs lead to interesting industrial applications but the thing that's usually an issue is that industry focus is on predictable, low cost and high yield. The type of research industry will do typically enables generational jumps in density or power improvements etc but until its really necessary they'll wait to adopt highly novel academic research and then spend time figuring out how to make things manufacturable.
The reality of getting a job in semicondutors though is most likely you're going to do something design/verification related, process work will come to you from your fabricator in the form of a PDK (process development kit) which will have all the parameters of the process and rules for manufacturing (and perhaps a good set of standard cells you can use for digital implementations with the initial parasitic extraction work done etc). Like any job its a little more standard in practice and bit less focused on the exotic stuff ;)