The U.S. needs to resume chip manufacturing

American innovation, from smart phone to search engine to Gene Sequencing, Based on incredibly complex and perfectly etched silicon. But few of these semiconductors are actually made in the United States. In 2019, only 12% of chips sold globally were made in the United States, down from 37% in 1990.

For decades, this was not considered a problem. American companies are the world leader in designing cutting-edge chips, and this is the most valuable and important part of the process.

Now, the situation is changing.Caused by supply disruption Pandemic Competing with increasingly fierce technology China Prompt industry executives and policymakers to say that the United States must actually Make, Not only design, but also chips.

“If we don’t start producing more semiconductors in the United States, it will pose a national security risk,” Gina RaimundoThe Secretary of Commerce said at an event in Washington DC on Tuesday.

Speak at the meeting Global Emerging Technology SummitSponsored by the National Artificial Intelligence Security Council, Raimondo said that the overall market share is only part of the story. “The other data, I personally think, is even more shocking. [is that] Currently, the proportion of cutting-edge chips made in the United States is zero,” she told an audience of policy makers and executives.

That might be a big problem. The most complex and powerful computer chips have promoted progress in the following areas: artificial intelligence with 5G, Which is expected to release huge economic value and competitive advantage. “There is no entrepreneur or big company here that can do what they do without semiconductors,” Raimundo said.

The Biden administration has expressed its intention to strengthen the domestic chip industry. The CHIPS for America bill will provide $52 billion in funding for the semiconductor industry within five years and will be passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act; a measure to begin the allocation of funds has been passed in the Senate and is awaiting action by the House of Representatives.

The most advanced computer chips are manufactured using manufacturing techniques that operate at physical limits, using extreme engineering techniques to manufacture nano-sized components (a nanometer is about one-100,000th the width of a human hair).

In recent years, the number of companies manufacturing advanced chips has decreased, and cutting-edge manufacturing has moved eastward. An April report by the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Boston Consulting Group found that all chips manufactured using the most advanced method (called sub-10 nanometer process) are made in Asia-92% are made in Taiwan and the remaining 8% are in Korea manufacture.

The semiconductor manufacturing industry began to move out of the United States in the 1980s, saying Dan Hutchison, CEO of analysis company VLSI Research, with the emergence of electronic design automation, it is possible to automate many tedious tasks involved in circuit design layout.A new batch of so-called fabless semiconductor companies has emerged, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, with Nvidia, It designed the chips but did not produce them. At the same time, companies known as foundries rose to specialize in manufacturing chips.

“You don’t need to be a semiconductor engineer to design chips,” Hutcheson said. “At the same time, the cost of the fab has become so expensive that if you are a small company, you can’t do it.”

Hutchison said that around 2015, after China announced plans to invest a lot of money to advance its own chip manufacturing, the US Department of Defense began to worry about what this might mean for the United States. “I went to Washington, D.C. more than in my entire career that year,” he said.

Of course there are still some major chip manufacturing companies in the United States, the most striking is IntelHowever, a series of errors in advanced manufacturing methods and the failure to foresee the rise of mobile computing and artificial intelligence have caused Intel to lag behind its competitors in Taiwan and TSMC. Samsung in Korea.