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在线翻译:
szdaily -> World Economy -> 
Biden’s chip dreams face reality check
    2021-04-15  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

TO understand U.S. President Joe Biden’s challenge in taming a semiconductor shortage bedeviling automakers and other industries, consider a chip supplied by a U.S. firm for Hyundai Motor Co.’s new electric vehicle, the IONIQ 5.

Production of the chip, a camera image sensor designed by On Semiconductor, begins at a factory in Italy, where raw silicon wafers are imprinted with complex circuitry.

The wafers are then sent first to Taiwan for packaging and testing, then to Singapore for storage, then on to the Chinese mainland for assembly into a camera unit, and finally to a Hyundai component supplier in South Korea before reaching Hyundai’s auto factories.

A shortage of that image sensor has led to the idling of Hyundai Motor’s plant in South Korea, making it the latest automaker to suffer from global supply woes that crippled production at most automakers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motors Co. and Volkswagen.

And the winding journey of the image sensor shows just how complicated it will be for the chip industry to both ramp up capacity to address the current shortage and re-invigorate U.S. chip manufacturing.

Biden on Monday convened semiconductor industry executives in Washington to discuss solutions to the chip crisis, the latest move in a broader effort to bolster the U.S. chip industry. He’s also proposed US$50 billion to support chip manufacturing and research as part of his US$2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which he said would help the United States win the global competition with China.

Much of that money will likely go towards the construction of multi-billion-dollar advanced chip plants by Intel, Samsung and TSMC. But industry executives say addressing the broader supply chain is crucial, and the Biden administration faces complicated choices on which of its elements to subsidize.

“Trying to reconstruct an entire supply chain from upstream to downstream in a single given location just isn’t a possibility,” said David Somo, senior vice president at On Semiconductor. “It would be prohibitively expensive.”

The United States now only accounts for about 12 percent of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing capacity, down from 37 percent in 1990. More than 80 percent of global chip production now happens in Asia, according to industry data.

Producing a single computer chip can involve more than 1,000 steps, 70 separate border crossings and a host of specialized companies, most of them in Asia and largely unknown to the public.

The process starts with plate-size discs of raw silicon. At chip factories known as fabs, circuits are etched into the silicon and built up on its surface through a series of complicated chemical processes.

The next step — packaging — offers a good illustration of the supply chain challenges.

Wafers emerge from fabs with hundreds or even thousands of fingernail-sized chips on each disc. They must be cut up into individual chips and put into a package.

Traditionally that meant placing each chip onto a “lead frame” and soldering it to a circuit board. The entire assembly would then be packaged in a resin case to protect it.

That process is very labor intensive, leading chip companies to outsource it decades ago to countries and regions including Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and the Chinese mainland.

The packaging step itself has its own supply chain: South Korea’s Haesung DS, for example, makes packaging components for automotive chips, exporting them to Malaysia or Thailand for customers including Infineon and NXP. These firms then assemble and package chips for automotive suppliers like Bosch and Continental, which in turn supply final products to automakers.

“If they [the Biden administration] are going to be successful with this, they are going to have to help rebuild the package industry here in the United States,” said Dick Otte, CEO of Promex, a California-based chip packaging firm.

“Otherwise, it is a waste of time. It is like building a car and not having a body to put on it.”

(SD-Agencies)

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