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American innovation, mobile phones ra search engines ra gene sequencing, is built on an incredibly intricate and perfectly engraved silicon base. Few of these semiconductors are made in the US. In 2019, only 12 percent of chips sold worldwide were made in the U.S., down from 37 percent in 1990.
For decades, that wasn’t seen as a problem. U.S. companies were world leaders in designing cutting-edge chips, the most valuable and important part of the process.
Now, that is changing. Internet supply disruptions pandemic and increasing competition with technology China sector executives and policymakers are saying what the US really needs to say do, not just design, chips.
“It’s a national security risk if we don’t start producing more semiconductors in America” Gina Raimondo, The U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said at an event in Washington, DC on Tuesday.
In the lecture Global Emerging Technology SummitEncouraged by the National Artificial Intelligence Security Commission, Raimondo said the overall market share accounts for only part of the story. “I think another piece of data, which is personally more worrying, [is that] zero percent of the top chips are made in America right now, ”he told policymakers and executives.
That could be a big problem. The most complex and powerful computer chips drive progress Artificial intelligence and 5G, and at the same time it is expected to unlock high economic value and competitive advantage. “There’s not an entrepreneur here, not even a big company, that can do what they do without a semiconductor,” Raimondo said.
The Biden administration has stated its intention to strengthen the home chip industry. The CHIPS for America Act, which would fund a $ 52 billion semiconductor industry for five years, was passed under the National Defense Authorization Act; the measure to start distributing the funds has been passed by the Senate and is awaiting action in the House.
The most advanced computer chips are made using manufacturing techniques that work at the frontier of physics, using extreme engineering feats to work on components that measure nanometers (one nanometer is about 100,000 feet wide for a human hair).
The number of companies making advanced chips has declined in recent years, and cutting-edge manufacturing has moved eastward. A report by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Boston Consulting Group found in April that all chips made with the most advanced methods (known as processes under 10 nanometers) are made in Asia — 92 percent in Tahwan, the remaining 8 percent in South Korea.
Semiconductor manufacturing began to emerge from the U.S. in the 1980s, he says Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, an analyst firm that, with the advent of electronic design automation, has made it possible to automate much of the laborious work involved in designing a circuit design. A new crop of semiconductor companies was created, among others Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Nvidia, they designed it but did not create chips. At the same time, companies known as foundries were created to specialize in making shavings.
“You can design the chip without being a semiconductor engineer,” Hutcheson says. “At the same time, because the cost of factories was rising, you couldn’t do it if you were a small business.”
Around 2015, Hutcheson says China announced plans to invest large sums of money to advance its chip manufacturing, as the U.S. Department of Defense began to worry about what that might mean for America. “I went to Washington DC that year more than I had in my entire career,” he says.
The US still has some major chip manufacturing companies in particular Intel. But a series of stumbling blocks around advanced manufacturing methods, along with predicting the rise of mobile computing and AI, have seen Intel Taiwan and TSMC rivals lag behind. Samsung South Korean.
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