They are electronic chips, and they are one of the most important inventions of humanity, if not the most important. Despite their small size, they can perform tremendous tasks that make our lives easier.
They are very small black chips made of silicon to control electrical current, the chips are made up of one or more transistors, which may reach billions of transistors, and they act as BINARY gates that help store and use information and they are the basis for the operation of any electronic device, from mobile phones, computers, and video games to cars and airplanes.
The size of the global market for electronic chips this year is about 500 billion US dollars, with an expectation that the size of the market will continue to increase.
Number one in the world:
The largest manufacturer of semiconductors in the world is Taiwan, where it manufactures 55% of the global manufacturing volume.
The Taiwanese company TSMC is considered the largest conductor manufacturing company in the world with a market value of up to 600 billion US dollars, the company that is indispensable globally for most advanced industries and can manufacture a transistor half the size of the Coronavirus, while South Korea is considered the second largest manufacturer of electronic chips in the world and the largest importer is China, which imports about 60% of the global industry volume, that means, the volume of China's import of electronic chips exceeds the volume of its import of petroleum by more than 100 US billion us dollars, and this is despite the great importance of petroleum in the field of energy for the world's factory (China) and the Chinese people's need for it as fuel and other of its many uses.
The unknown soldier in the world of electronic chips:
The Dutch company Philips is considered one of the most important influencers in the field of electronic chips, as it owns 27% of the size of the Taiwanese company TSMC. It also owns a subsidiary in the Netherlands that manufactures one of the most complex industries, which is the machines that manufacture electronic chips, a company called ASML, the company manufactures lithography machines, machines that print a transistor onto a piece of silicon.
American concern:
Although transistor technology was manufactured in the United States in the 1950s, and the beginning was from the American company Intel, the first electronic chip manufacturer in the United States, the US factories cannot manufacture the electronic chips found in, for example, Apple devices or F35 aircraft, as they are imported from Taiwan through TSMC, The US imports about 92% of its semiconductor needs, and Taiwan is the largest exporter to American markets, which prompted the American administration to develop a plan to begin investing and manufacturing semiconductors independently without relying on foreign markets, and for this it invested more than 50 billion US dollars initially to achieve independence. In the field of semiconductor industry, the matter is still in its primitive stages.
Electronic chips have become completely like oxygen for the industrial world, as it depends entirely on them, and a slight shortage of them leads to the destruction of many areas of industry and a sharp rise in global prices with the inability to manufacture large quantities of them due to the large global demand for them and the high cost of manufacturing, which is still high until now.
In addition to the scarcity of materials used in manufacturing.