How China Could Create a Global Semiconductor Shortage

Given the importance of semiconductors in technology and Taiwan's dominance over their production, they've become a geo-political issue in recent years. In this video, we breakdown why one of the world's biggest issues is over the world's smallest tech.

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[achernarchang]

As a Taiwanese, I just want to add something to put things into context and perspective.

We didn't try to stake all into semiconductors just for strategic reasons. We did so because we didn't have other choices. Since only very few countries recognise our statehood, we had nearly no political power to sign free trade agreements with foreign countries. As a result, our export products face higher tariffs and therefore are less competitive than other countries.

Semiconductor chips are one of the few things we produce that can survive this disadvantage simply because very few countries have the technology, investment, and talent pool like we do. All this eventually led to us staking almost everything into the semiconductor business.

Our "monopoly" in the advanced chip production end becoming the strategic "silicon shield" is more of a surprising side effect, though a welcoming one as far as we're concerned.

[JHayler]

Maybe Taiwan wants to keep the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the country as a deterrence to a Chinese invasion and to gain support from the US.

[Quxxy]

Based on my (lay, but interested outsider) understanding, I don't think the statement "the smallest components are 3 nanometers" is correct. The names used for modern fabrication processes (like "7nm", "5nm", "3nm") don't actually denote how large the features are. Instead, they are a statistical measure of theoretical feature size if you had old-school planar components for a particular set of target devices (like SRAM). They do this because fabbing got HARD, and they had to start using complex 3D structures that can't really be neatly measured by a simple "how wide is a gate". So it's more like "3nm" means it has "component density roughly equivalent to the density you *would* have if it were possible to miniaturise old-school planar transistors to 3nms".

A consequence of this is you can have two different processes called "7nm" that DO NOT have comparable transistor densities. This is partly why Intel is moving away from names that include "nm" to names like "20A", and they got sick of trying to explain to the press that the names don't mean what they think they mean. You know, *exactly* the thing you've just done. :P

To be fair: they probably should have stopped using names that look like simple measurements when it was no longer true, but presumably kept doing it for marketing reasons.

[JamesRoyceDawson]

In hindsight, pinning the worlds technological future on a single island off the coast of a hostile neighbour wasn’t the best bet

[gaussmanv]

To clarify something here (sorry I'm a nerd), but the light doesn't inscribe the material onto a semiconductor. Light is used to photocure a resistive mask in a pattern of what you're trying to make. The photo resist that isn't cured will be washed away leaving a pattern. Then you get to etching with acids and plasmas or deposition of other materials (like gold) through a number of different treatments. This process is repeated a number of times to etch and deposit a 3d structure of circuits. Semiconductors are great because you can tune their conductivity allowing you to switch them off and on.

[Miamcoline]

Super interesting as always. Better explained than almost any video ive seen about the topic to this day!

[tammylin]

Best short description of semiconductors I’ve yet heard. Good info. Tks

[Daivd]

If covid and miners sent graphic card price through the roof, imagine what a war would mean for regular buyers

[seadkolasinac]

I reckon that’d be pretty catastrophic for them as well as the rest of the world

[NghtStalkerNL]

Good video but you missed out on an essential detail.
Taiwan is VERY aware of their supremacy in the semi-conductor industry and the biggest and most advanced TSMC foundries are located right next to the few potential landing sites of a Chinese amphibious invasion. Basically they have placed their global value in the center of a potential future battlefield to ensure China won't try, also known as the Taiwanese silicon shield. On top of that, while you did brush over The Netherlands supplying lithography equipment, ASML Holding is the only company that can produce machines capable of producing Taiwan's high-tech chips. What this means is that IF the Taiwanese foundries are destroyed in an invasion, they CANNOT BE REBUILD without The Netherlands/Europe approving it. Something they will not be likely to do if the island is taken by force.

[tanjoy]

Let’s get down to that Business Channel!

[bikkiikun]

Problem (for China) is, that such a Crisis would hit China first and foremost and most severely and most long term.
Why? Because Chinese production facilities are the most dependend on chips from Taiwan. On the other hand Taiwanese Chip makers are already setting up secondary (backup) operations outside of China's reach in America and Europe.
So... ultimately this would not just be China shooting its own foot, China would more likely aim at the upper torso or the head, before pulling the trigger.

[tinkinator]

For decades manufacturing has been moved to asia, only because it increases the bottom line of the business owner class, it hardly benefits Asia's working class, never mind western workers.

While we've seen more Chinese people out of poverty for example, many of them still can't afford to live without working, and have virtually no chance of marriage and high enough income to afford a family without investing in housing, a very volatile sector that is crashing down in China rn.

We should make more things in Europe and the US, not only is there a moral, political and economic imperitave to do this, it's a environment one as well. Many thousands of tonnes of CO2 can be prevented shipping so much cargo from asia to here where possible. Also China leans heavily on Coal for energy to power industry, which doesn't help either.

While their should be more incentives to encourage manufacture and assembly in the West, human rights and fair pay should never be comphromised, these things are exploited so the billionaires can have a few extra 0's in their offshore tax havens, which they'd never spend anyway.

We need a fairer system that encourages fair treatment and allows for greater self-sufficienct with aligned nations, not relying on china and it's anxious neighbours making everyday essentials like semi-conductors.

[FinnB]

The thing that angers me the as semiconductors and not cpus as they are called in the tech community.

[AloisAgos]

Seems Taiwan has a lot of leverage in this department. Used strategically they should be able to deter any major conflict in the region and keep both economic superpowers in check.

[sugarly]

The point is that it is a group IV element and that silicon is perhaps one the most abundant materials on earth and so is cheap. Group IV elements can be manipulated by doping with impurities like a group V or group III, essentially causing the substrate to have either an additional free moving valance electron - essentially making it negatively charged or n-doped or by removing a valence electron making the product a positively charged entity or p-doped. The amount of doping then determines the strength of the electric field of the final substrate and hence the uses for it. In electronics, these are mainly used to create transistors which are a type of electrical switch that are essentially a signal propagated or a medium of storage. Transistors and diodes make Logic switches = compute. And for awhile the goal was to make these transistors smaller and smaller until they now reach the physical limit of 5nm ( that’s 10^-9m or which TSMC is the only one in the world that can produce and not so long ago also held a monopoly on 7nm transistors, of which china has shown was able to manufacture via brute force and unlimited government resources. Some notable economists like Jeffrey Sachs believe that within 2-3 years time, china will have invented the 5 nm transistor themselves which negates the current lead TSMC and the west has.

[samsorensen]

There are machines in the fabs in that companies, like ASML in the Netherlands, refuse to send to China over fears of IP theft. I can see China invading Taiwan just for those machines. They don’t need to worry about all of the other supplies because they can source that material themselves. What would China do to get their hands on an EUV scanner?

[GreenBlueWalkthrough]

Also if China invades Taiwan there is no reason to think the fabs would be safe... As China/Taiwan could simply miss and damage/destroy the fabs on accident, China/Taiwan/rebels/The US could destroy/threaten to destroy the fabs as an nuclear option to win the war... So I would think unless that bit of the island becomes a UN protected zone the fabs could or would suffer damage and that would be very bad.

[EliJon]

Taiwan and the US have already signed, and started construction, on new Fabs in the US. And much of the technology required to continue the production of the semiconductors is manufactured and supplied by European and US companies. So even if Taiwan is invaded the US and Europe will be able to produce locally, maybe not immediately but in short time. China however do not have, and have had restrictions put on them, the ability to do this. An invasion from China would destroy Taiwan's ability to continue manufacturing the chips, invasion means war, and this destroys infrastructure. The US, Europe, South Korea and Japan have the upper hand on this issue, that is not speculation, that is a fact, and all these nations, especially now, are allies. China would lose out big time should they invade, it would be a massive mistake and economic and social suicide for China to do this.

[tinhov]

I hope they wait until I was able to buy a new PC