How can chips become the cornerstone of the modern economy? Semiconductors are the cornerstone of the modern economy. Everything from emails to guided missiles is inseparable from semiconductors. However, parts of the semiconductor supply chain, especially for cutting-edge chips, depend on key nodes controlled by a small number of companies. For decades, few people worried about this – until Covid and geopolitical tensions highlighted the sector's vulnerability. Tufts University's Chris Miller's brilliant new book, "Chip War," shows readers how economic, geopolitical, and technological forces are shaping the chip industry.
Source: The Economist Business Opinion The Economist Group
Chips and the world
Chips and the world
"Chip Wars" traces the development of the semiconductor industry
The global chip industry is vital, but fragile, and worrying
In 1947, at Bell Labs, a subsidiary of telecommunications giant AT&T, a group of researchers invented the transistor, a switch that controls current and is a fundamental building block of modern electronic devices. Ten years later, researchers put several transistors on a single silicon wafer to make "integrated circuits", that is, chips. A thriving industry has sprung up across California, with low-value jobs such as assembly outsourced to Asia, where labor costs are lower.
Innovation came quickly. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who later became co-founder of Intel, an American chip-making giant, accurately predicted that by shrinking transistors, engineers would double the number of transistors on a chip about every two years — an improvement that in turn would double the chip's performance.
As the market evolved, so did the growing interest in chips from competitors in the United States. The first was the Soviet Union, which tried to create a Silicon Valley but failed. Later, Japanese companies such as Toshiba and Fujitsu successfully occupied a place in part of the chip market. But the strategic threat comes from China, which currently spends more on chip imports than oil. China is demanding that tech giants reduce their reliance on foreign chips; Tens of billions of dollars are allocated annually to achieve this goal. The first priority, however, is not to match U.S. technology, but to catch up with Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world's high-end logic chips for data processing come from.
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