Frictions

Excerpt

Roland Berger has already drawn attention to the Taiwanese or Asian geopolitical risk zone in the ATZelectronics edition 01-02/2021: "Only two companies in the world are in a position to manufacture cutting-edge integrated circuits, and all their production facilities are located in regions with high political and/or seismic risk". Thierry Breton echoed these concerns in the Handelsblatt edition of January 28, 2022 where he also pointed out the excessive concentration of semiconductor manufacturing facilities in East Asia with regard to Taiwan and prophesized massive problems in the supply of semiconductors should a conflict occur. Samsung and TSMC are now indeed the two companies who are furthest out front in the production of circuits with structural widths in the ranges of 2 to 3 nm that are required for the computing cores of AI and Co. However, these are not the only eminently important products that originate in this region. Even other components from there are not easy to replace, despite (at least expressed in nanometers) their lower levels of complexity. …