![]() There are very few manufacturers with the capacity to build silicon chips at the incredibly small nanometer scale, and this production challenge is only growing as these chips get smaller every year while the demand for them continues to explode. While we often hear about the ongoing shortage of silicon, what we really mean is the shortage of silicon chips. Silicon is also readily available and extremely cheap, since it is the main ingredient in beach sand. Silicon is the chief ingredient in all modern computer chips because of its ability to act as either a conductor or an insulator of electrical current. There are microprocessors (also known as central processing units or CPUs), memory chips (used for short-term storage of digital data), graphical processing units (GPUs), and commodity integrated circuits (CICs) used in single-purpose appliances such as barcode scanners. That’s about one-fourth the size of the smallest viruses- only 50 times larger than a single hydrogen atom!Ĭomputer chips serve a variety of different purposes, but they broadly fall into four categories. ![]() Apple’s M1 Max chip, developed for the MacBook Pro, is even more impressive, containing 114 billion transistors built on the 5-nanometer scale. It consisted of 2,300 transistors and was one of the first to use silicon gate technology, which made it possible to increase the circuit density fivefold compared to previous computer chips.īy comparison, Intel’s 12th-generation i9-12900K CPU contains 3 billion transistors, each one only 7 nanometers in width (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). The first commercially available computer chip was the Intel 4004 microprocessor, released in 1971. These operations are the basis for all modern computing. These electronic circuits work with the help of transistors, which serve as tiny switches that turn an electrical current on or off. With millions of products from cars to smartphones to washing machines reliant on these postage stamp-sized computing powerhouses, entire end-product production lines had to come to a standstill and legions of consumer products became unavailable.Ī computer chip is a packaged set of electronic circuits printed onto a thin, circular wafer made of the element silicon, one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust. There are few manufacturers capable of meeting the soaring demand for highly advanced chips, and these suppliers were caught off guard by the massive global pandemic-driven surge in demand for more computer processing power. Chip fabrication facilities are running full blast, but that still isn’t enough to satisfy the voracious global demand. The short answer is that making computer chips is incredibly complicated. Computer chips are in the news today because they are in short supply, which is causing widespread global disruptions Why can’t we just manufacture more chips?
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