The looming global battle over semiconductor supply

A shortage of semiconductors – essential components in electronic devices – has spooked businesses and governments. It could even spark future geopolitical conflicts. Simon Wilson reports.

Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen visiting a military base
Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen (top, centre): her country’s chip industry is a tempting geopolitical prize
(Image credit: © RITCHIE B TONGO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

What are semiconductors?

As the name implies, semiconductors are materials whose physical properties fall between those that can conduct electricity (such as copper and aluminium) and insulators that can’t (glass and ceramics). Silicon, germanium or carbon are all natural semiconductors. In a process called “doping”, small amounts of “dopant” impurities can be added to pure semiconductor crystals of compounds such as gallium arsenide or cadmium selenide, which causes big changes in the conductivity of the material. It is this property that makes them useful in the building of electronic circuits. When two types of semiconductor are put together, you can build a diode, a crucial electronic component that acts as a “turnstile”, conducting electrical current in only one direction. You can then build a transistor, created by using three layers of semiconductors, and then a silicon chip, which is a small piece of silicon that can hold thousands of transistors. These are the foundations of the microprocessors that make modern computing possible.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.