...About 50 (click here) employees at Three Square Market have agreed to the optional implant of the chips, which are the approximate size and shape of a grain of rice, said Tony Danna, vice president of international sales at the River Falls-based company....
How bad is the shortage (click here) “Never seen anything like it,” Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted last month. Since late 2020, the world has been facing an unexpected dearth of microchips – the tiny integrated circuits that are nowadays found in practically every manufactured device with a battery or a plug – from toasters to TVs to airbags to fighter jets.
The scarcity was first seen in sophisticated consumer electronics: gaming consoles like the PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox have had big order backlogs; prices for computer graphics cards have shot up. But because semiconductor chips are so ubiquitous, a large number of industries have been affected.
The car industry has been hit hardest of all. Modern cars can easily contain 3,000 chips, and the shortage has slowed down vehicle assembly lines across the world: global output will drop by four million cars, nearly 5%, this year.
Why is it happening?
At the best of times, chip supply chains are hard to maintain: it is an industry prone to gluts and shortages. Fabrication plants (“fabs”) for advanced chips are among the world’s most complex manufacturing facilities, costing tens of billions of dollars to build. Lasers print billions of transistors onto tiny areas of silicon wafers; it can take three to four months to turn a large silicon wafer into a useable batch of chips....
How bad is the shortage (click here) “Never seen anything like it,” Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted last month. Since late 2020, the world has been facing an unexpected dearth of microchips – the tiny integrated circuits that are nowadays found in practically every manufactured device with a battery or a plug – from toasters to TVs to airbags to fighter jets.
The scarcity was first seen in sophisticated consumer electronics: gaming consoles like the PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox have had big order backlogs; prices for computer graphics cards have shot up. But because semiconductor chips are so ubiquitous, a large number of industries have been affected.
The car industry has been hit hardest of all. Modern cars can easily contain 3,000 chips, and the shortage has slowed down vehicle assembly lines across the world: global output will drop by four million cars, nearly 5%, this year.
Why is it happening?
At the best of times, chip supply chains are hard to maintain: it is an industry prone to gluts and shortages. Fabrication plants (“fabs”) for advanced chips are among the world’s most complex manufacturing facilities, costing tens of billions of dollars to build. Lasers print billions of transistors onto tiny areas of silicon wafers; it can take three to four months to turn a large silicon wafer into a useable batch of chips....
