The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness (Saif M. Khan, Alexander Mann, Dahlia Peterson)

The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness

Summary

This report analyzes the current supply chain for semiconductors. It particularly focuses on which portions of the supply chain are controlled by US and its allies and China. Some key insights:

The US semiconductor industry is estimated to contribute 39 percent of the total value of the global semiconductor supply chain.
The semiconductor supply chain is incredibly complicated. The production of a single chip requires more than 1,000 steps and passes through borders more than 70 times throughout production.
AMD is currently the only company with expertise in designing both high-end GPUs and high-end CPUs.
TSMC controls 54% of the logic foundry market, with a larger share for leading edge production, e.g., state-of-the-art 5 nm node chips.
Revenue per wafer for TSMC is rapidly increasing, while other foundries are seeing declines.
The Netherlands has a monopoly on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanners, equipment needed to make the most advanced chips.
The Netherlands and Japan have a monopoly on argon floride (ArF) immersion scanners, needed to make the second most advanced chips.
The US has a monopoly on full-spectrum electronic design automation (EDA) software needed to design semiconductors.
Japan, Taiwan, Germany and South Korea manufacture the state-of-the-art 300 mm wafers used for 99.7 percent of the world's chip manufacturing. This manufacturing process requires large amounts of tacit know-how.
China controls the largest share of manufacturing for most natural materials. The US and its allies have a sizable share in all materials except for low-grade gallium, tungsten and magnesium.
China controls ~2/3rds of the world's silicon production, but the US and allies have reserves.

The report also analyzes US competitiveness at very detailed levels of the supply chain, which I didn't read that carefully. Tables:

Opinion

One perspective on the economy is that it's running a vast, distributed computation to allocate supply to demand in a relatively efficient manner. Examining the details on one of the supply chains underpinning a half a trillion dollar industry is relatively awe-inspiring. The only thing I'm currently aware of that is as complicated as computer hardware is ...

Intermittent Distllations