2023-09-03 18:27:37
Contents
Taiwan, the most important production location, is feeling the effects of the struggle for global microchip supremacy.
Mobile phones, cars and military jets only work thanks to microchips. By far the most technically advanced semiconductors are produced on the island in the Pacific. But the Taiwan location is under pressure.
Caption: Tu Chih-Chan is one of the well-paid 320,000 employees in Taiwan’s microchip industry. He designs chips for the 5G mobile network. SRF
Microchip designer Tu Chih-Chan designs microchips for the 5G mobile network. “It’s a bit like making pizza. When making pizza you have to decide, do you put shrimp, pineapple and onions on it? And how do you arrange them? I look at what we put on the microchip and how we arrange the ingredients,” explains the thirty-something between the piano and toys in the home office.
Distributed Value Chain
Tu Chih-Chan needs special software from the USA for his work. The fully designed semiconductor is then produced by another company in Taiwan, the world’s largest chip manufacturer TSMC: “TSMC makes the pizza. With a machine that they imported from Europe.» The example shows how globally distributed the production chain of the semiconductor industry is.
But it is precisely this global supply chain that the governments in the USA, Europe and China are trying to open up with hundreds of billions of dollars. Everyone wants to have as much as possible with them. This is a problem for Taiwan, says economist Liu Pei-Chen. The director of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research researches the local semiconductor industry.
Legend: TSMC is a world leader in manufacturing microchips, especially the most advanced microchips. SRF / Samuel Emch
“The demarcation between the Chinese and the non-Chinese camp will become clearer in the future,” emphasizes Liu Pei-Chen. The main reason is the trade war between China and the USA. For example, the US has banned the sale of the latest generation of microchips to China.
“So I’m afraid that orders from China and the United States will decrease a bit in the future. Taiwan has to pay close attention to that,” says Liu Pei-Chen.
There is a shortage of skilled workers worldwide
This development is a problem for the industry around the world. That’s what Burn Lin says. The 81-year-old is a veteran in the semiconductor industry. He has worked for IBM and TSCM for a long time and is currently establishing a semiconductor engineering institute at Tsinghua University in Taipei.
If everyone now wants to have all the know-how for the chip design, the production machines and processes, this will exacerbate the shortage of skilled workers that is otherwise already prevalent.
Caption: Engineers are trained at Tsinghua University in Taipei to alleviate the shortage of skilled workers in the industry. SRF
Burn Lin, whose research led to a quantum leap in microchip production in the 1980s, fears that the industry will be paralysed.
“One of the main ingredients for rapid growth is quantity. If we make an improvement in production, we can quickly see if it works at high throughput. If the volume is distributed now and goes down, we will slow down as an industry.”
More expensive electronic devices
Economist Liu Pei-Chen fears that the chip industry will not only slow down but also become more expensive. Because building supply chains costs hundreds of billions. These would have to be funded. This increases the price of microchips. And: “This will ultimately be reflected in the price of electronic products that you and I buy as consumers,” says economist Liu Pei-Chen.
It will be a while before we feel these effects. The situation is different with chip designer Tu Chih-Chan. It has already been tackled by Chinese and US companies. But because of the uncertainties, he has other plans. He will soon move to the financial industry. For the semiconductor industry, however, such departures are another problem.
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