10/10/2021
What is a chip shortage?
As the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many factories closed with it, making the supplies needed for chip manufacturing unavailable for months. Increased demand for consumer electronics caused shifts that rippled up the supply chain. Orders began to pile up as manufacturers struggled to create enough chips to meet the new levels of demand. A backlog began to grow and grow and grow.
What are these chips?
The chips, often called semiconductors, sometimes called microchips, function as the brains of our electronics. They’re tiny technological marvels, hosting billions of transistors within them, though the size of the chip can vary. (Those transistors are like tiny little gates, allowing electrons to pass through them or not.) Their construction involves multiple steps, days, and experts on hand. For example, IBM’s newest chip packs 50 billion transistors into a two nanometer, fingernail-sized space.
