The report comes amid a global chip shortage that started
with overbooked factories in Taiwan late last year, but has since been
exacerbated by a fire at a plant in Japan, a freeze that knocked out
electricity in the US state of Texas, and a worsening drought in Taiwan this
year. The shortage has idled some production lines at automobile factories in
the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Modern chipmaking involves more than a thousand steps and
requires complex intellectual property, tools and chemicals from around the
world. But the Semiconductor Industry Association, representing most US
chipmakers, on Thursday said it found more than 50 places in the supply chain
where a single region has more than 65 percent market share.
Intellectual property and software to design cutting-edge
chips, for example, is dominated by the United States, while special gases key
to fabricating chips come from Europe. And the manufacturing of the most
advanced chips is completely located in Asia — 92 percent of it in Taiwan.
If Taiwan were unable to make chips for a year, it would
cost the global electronics industry almost half a trillion dollars in revenue,
the report found: "The global electronics supply chain would come to a
halt."
Still, the study warned, a go-it-alone approach in which
governments try to replicate the supply chain domestically is infeasible
because it would cost $1.2 trillion globally - with up to $450 billion of that
cost in the US alone — causing the price of chips to skyrocket.
In some cases, though, it called for incentives to create
"minimum viable capacity" in regions that lack any part of the supply
chain.
In the case of the US and Europe, that would mean new
advanced chip factories to balance concentration in Taiwan and South Korea.
"We don't have enough semiconductor manufacturing in
the United States... And it's got to be fixed with the assistance of the US
government," John Neuffer, chief executive officer of the association,
told Reuters.
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