Why the World's Microchip Crisis Will Last Longer Than You Think

Short Summary: Microchips are in most of today's technology, from an electric toothbrush to an SUV. But the supply of microchips has yet to catch up with its growing demand. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to just increase production.
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It’s pretty hard to imagine a world without microchips. They’re not just in tech like your phone and computer, but in pretty much every electronic you’ll encounter today: refrigerators, washing machines, strings of LED lights, electric toothbrushes, cars, and so much more. They used to be so easy to get they cost only about a dollar each, but right now they’re going for as much as 150 bucks a pop because there’s a huge shortage, which isn’t entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why are these microchips so useful, and so in-demand? Well, they’re Moore’s Law made real—tens of billions of transistors packed into a space about as big as your pinky fingernail. A transistor is essentially a tiny electrical switch that lets electrons flow when open or stops them when closed. These transistors are layered over and around one another on a wafer made of silicon to create a network that functions together as a circuit. The pattern of electrons flowing through these gates, plus sensors and other stuff, allow you to communicate with the device. But these chips are getting smaller and smaller, packed with more and more processing power.

When we’re talking about ten of billions of transistors in the space of a few nanometers, the manufacturing becomes HUGELY complicated and time-consuming. We’re talking cleanrooms with air 10,000 times more filtered than normal room air etching the transistors with super precise lasers A facility capable of producing chips like this costs tens of billions of dollars to make, so…they’re just a little tough to get up and running. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of those invaluable chip factories had to close, along with the rest of the world.

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Read More:
The Chip Shortage Keeps Getting Worse. Why Can’t We Just Make More?
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-chip-production-why-hard-to-make-semiconductors/
Before you put silicon into chipmaking machines, you need a clean room. A very clean room. Individual transistors are many times smaller than a virus. Just one speck of dust can cause havoc and millions of dollars of wasted effort. To mitigate this risk, chipmakers house their machines in rooms that essentially have no dust.

No quick fix for chip shortage
https://www.axios.com/no-quick-fix-chip-shortage-8cc09d53-9d6d-4774-922c-d5aaeb4d0646.html
Chipmakers, spurred on by the Biden administration and a bipartisan push on Capitol Hill, have announced nearly $80 billion in investments in U.S. manufacturing since the start of 2021, according to the White House.

The humble mineral that transformed the world
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-chip-changed-everything/
Semiconductor devices called transistors are the tiny electronic switches that run computations inside our computers. Scientists in the US built the first silicon transistor in 1947. Before that, the mechanics of computing had been performed by vacuum tubes, which were slow and bulky. Silicon changed everything.

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