Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. SOTO. Mr. Chair, I want to commend the managers of the House Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2026 Appropriations bill for including my amendment, No. 269, to provide a $24.1 million increase within the RDT&E-Defense Wide Account, to the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program's (IBAS) Fan-Out Wafer level packaging program in the en bloc package.

Semiconductors support nearly all Department of Defense (DoD) activities. Ensuring secure access to leading-edge semiconductors, however, is a challenge. The pandemic exposed the challenges associated with the global supply chain, the changing global semiconductor industry, and the sophistication of U.S. adversaries, who might target military electronic components.

IBAS is dedicated to ensuring that the DoD is positioned to effectively address industrial base issues and support the National Security Innovation Base. This includes strengthening and protecting the domestic semiconductor supply chain to provide access to leading- edge capabilities to accelerate innovation. One of the next generation semiconductor technologies that IBAS is focusing on is called Advanced Packing.

Advanced Packaging essentially removes the green circuit board, and connects each component chip onto each other, like how individual Lego pieces can be stacked on top of each other to form a Lego set. This next generation process fully integrates all component chips into a single, advanced packaged, chip. Currently, 98 percent of these advanced packaging, integrated processes, are done in Asia, where foreign entities can insert malicious processes into these integrated chips in a way that is not easily identifiable. IBAS is working to provide secure, credible, and reliable domestic advanced packaged semiconductor manufacturing capability.

Fanout wafer level packaging technology is a critical leading-edge advanced packaging technology, providing a high degree of size, weight, and power performance improvements over traditional packaging processes. My amendment will allow the DoD to leverage existing public- private-partnerships to quickly expand domestic U.S. based semiconductor manufacturing development platforms for critical advanced semiconductor system integration, including fan-out wafer level packaging technology.

U.S. global leadership in semiconductors depends on U.S. owned firms operating at the leading-edge of advanced packaging technologies. The next generation of electronic devices will require significantly greater functional density, in other words, packing chips together even more tightly than current technology allows. This requires technical leadership in semiconductor advanced packaging processes, including fanout wafer level packaging.

I believe Congress should continue to provide the resources necessary to update our domestic microelectronics security framework. I am proud of the work being undertaken in my district's semiconductor technology district, known as NeoCity, to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing technology development as we work to address this critical supply chain. I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues to support this goal.

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