Aatmanirbhar Bharat: Why India Must Go The US-China Way In Semiconductor Chip Production | Swarajya

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In the last week of February 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the administration to address the worrying shortfall in semiconductor production that impacted operations at some auto plants.

The order was mainly focused on reviewing the United States supply chains for semiconductors, ensuring they were secure and reliable, especially as tensions with China mount.

However, while the executive order from the White House did not explicitly name China, it did highlight the growing global problem of chip shortage, in the wake of Covid-19. Given the shortage in chips, automakers in several parts of the US were forced to cut jobs and workers’ hours, further denting an economy battered by the pandemic.

What makes semiconductors so critical is their indispensability to most routine devices. Also referred to as integrated circuits (ICs) or microchips, these are made of pure elements, mostly silicon or germanium. They are critical to the manufacturing of electronic devices that include smartphones, radios, TVs, computers, and so forth.

In terms of global semiconductor sales, the industry went from $150 billion in 1999 to $250 billion in 2010 and $468.8 billion in 2018. However, the outlook for 2019 was negative for the first time in ten years.

By 2019, semiconductors worth $136 billion were being used for communication devices, $117.3 billion for computing devices, $54.7 billion for consumer devices like routers, switches, etc, $50.2 billion for cars, $48.9 billion for industrial equipment, and merely $5.2 billion for government purposes.

In 2020, the demand for these communication and computing devices went up as more people began working for home. What complicated matters were the drastic cuts implemented by auto and electronics manufacturers in the early days of the pandemic, anticipating lower demand, and then a sudden spike in demand within months leaving chip manufacturers with more demand for the supply.

#Semiconductor #China #US #Taiwan

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Routers and Switches
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