Compound Semiconductors in the Cognitive Age
For more than four decades, the semiconductor industry benefited from increasingly efficient and convenient global supply chains. Today, strategic materials concentration, geopolitical competition, industrial policy, and supply-chain volatility are driving a new imperative: the transition from convenient supply chains to strategic capability chains.
Throughout history, leadership in major technological eras has belonged to those who controlled and integrated the materials that enabled them. Bronze enabled civilizations. Iron enabled empires. Silicon enabled computing. Today, compound semiconductors have become indispensable to the infrastructure of the Cognitive Age.
Compound semiconductors were among the foundational materials of the Information Age. They made possible the semiconductor lasers that connected continents through fiber-optic networks, the wireless technologies that connected billions of people through mobile communications, the power electronics that enable modern energy systems, and the technologies that underpin aerospace and defense. In many respects, compound semiconductors became the materials platform that allowed humanity to communicate, compute, sense, and connect with unprecedented speed, scale, and efficiency. Today they sit on the critical path of artificial intelligence infrastructure, high-performance computing, intelligent energy systems, nuclear fusion, and emerging quantum technologies.
The stories of gallium arsenide and indium phosphide provide a powerful illustration of this transition. For decades, the United States was a global leader in III-V materials science, crystal growth, epitaxy, devices, and substrate manufacturing. Gallium arsenide substrates enabled the rise of microwave electronics, satellite communications, radar systems, and the wireless revolution. Indium phosphide substrates became essential for high-speed optical communications and the global fiber-optic infrastructure that powers today’s digital economy.
Vertical Gradient Freeze (VGF) crystal growth, invented at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1980s, became the de facto industry standard for manufacturing the InP substrates that underpin modern optical communications and AI infrastructure. Yet despite pioneering many of the technologies that enabled the Information Age, the United States today has no domestic manufacturing footprint for either InP or GaAs substrates—the foundational materials upon which much of that infrastructure continues to be built.
Recent Brookings Institution research on China’s economic statecraft underscores a defining reality of the Cognitive Age: nations do not compete through technologies alone. They compete through their ability to build, scale, train, and sustain entire industrial ecosystems. No nation can do this alone. Enduring capability chains will be built in concert with trusted allies who share both the burden and the strategic stake.
Drawing on experiences from Bell Laboratories and nearly four decades of compound semiconductor leadership across the United States, Asia, and Europe, this keynote introduces the concept of moving from convenient supply chains to strategic capability chains. It argues that long-term leadership in artificial intelligence and other strategic technologies will depend not only on innovation, but on the ability to sustain the materials, manufacturing, talent, and industrial ecosystems upon which those technologies depend.
The race for the Cognitive Age will not be won by algorithms alone. It will be won by those who can build and sustain the capability chains that make intelligence possible.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Chuck Mattera is Founder and CEO of Avalanche Thinking, Inc., a seed-to-scale investment platform focused on partnering with founders and knowledge experts building the technologies, companies, and industrial capabilities that will shape the future. Guided by the determination to "Disrupt Now and Redefine Forever," Avalanche Thinking targets Deep Tech investments across advanced materials, semiconductors, photonics, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, defense, space, the energy transition, and life sciences.
Dr. Mattera retired in 2024 as Chairman and CEO of Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR), where he led the bold transformation of II-VI Incorporated into a global leader in engineered materials, photonics, and lasers underpinned by a compound semiconductor platform. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has worked at the intersection of breakthrough technologies and the scalable manufacturing of disruptive products and services.
Beginning at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1984, Dr. Mattera held leadership positions in research and development, manufacturing, and general management. His work contributed to foundational semiconductor laser technologies and manufacturing infrastructure that enabled the fiber-optic communications networks connecting the modern world and that today underpin AI data centers and the digital economy.
Drawing on 40 years of experience operating across the United States, Asia, and Europe, he is interested in the strategic intersection of innovation ecosystems, advanced materials and manufacturing, and the policies required to rebuild resilient capability chains that will sustain long-term US competitiveness in the Cognitive Age.
Dr. Mattera is a member of the Foreign Policy Leadership Council of the Brookings Institution, where he also serves on the Board of Trustees. Dr. Mattera holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Brown University and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Rhode Island.