By HEIDI ANDERSON //
Chocolate chips are a staple in my snack stash. If I temporarily go healthy, overstocked chips could sit for weeks, but they’re always there waiting when I need them – and if they’re not, well, hope you don’t have a meeting with me that day.
Welcome to my personal supply chain. Many of us came to appreciate the value of supply chains during the pandemic: What do we stock? How much? Where do we get it? And what do we do when our regular chain fails?
In technology development, electronics supply-chain dynamics factor in from the earliest design stages. I might select my chocolate chips based on taste and price, but engineers – in addition to price and features – select their chips based on lead times, manufacturer reputation, global economics and politics, even the weather.
That’s a lot to consider! Now throw in a pandemic, and you see why global chip production and inventories are still stabilizing.
Heidi Anderson: Stacking chips.
Integrated circuits – commonly called “chips” – are the building blocks of our daily lives. And our routines have been through quite the transformation these past four years, evidenced especially by the ongoing worldwide chip crisis, which has created shortages in some areas, gluts in others and major price increases across the board, along with long order queues and rampant reselling of automobiles, consumer electronics, household appliances and more.
As we look to 2024, it appears queues and chip-manufacturing lines are finally stabilizing again. But regulating the flow doesn’t mean all is well.
Our newsfeeds are full of red flags about the volatility of the chip supply chain, leading to some dark places. It’s disappointing when my cool consumer-product acquisition is wonky – when the text message doesn’t send, the light switch doesn’t work or the fire department doesn’t respond, then I really take pause.
Initial funding awards made through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 have focused on 12-nanometer-and-up chips, known for better stability and common to military uses. That’s good news for upstate Malta-based, multinational-scale semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries – which is busily building out its 800-acre facility about 30 miles north of Albany – and for Long Island, where much of the manufacturing economy remains focused on the military and aerospace sectors.
Meanwhile, New York State’s Green CHIPS Program is working to foster semiconductor production hubs, offering up to $10 billion in economic incentives for environmentally friendly “green” semiconductor-manufacturing and supply-chain projects. And the U.S. Department of Commerce is looking for a home for its planned National Semiconductor Technology Center, future center-point of federal semiconductor-technology research.
Texas, Illinois and other regions have their strengths, but Nick Russo, general manager of Hauppauge-based electronics manufacture RCE Manufacturing, thinks the Northeast has the best chance to check off the proposed NSTC’s three key boxes: extending semiconductor leadership, streamlining new-tech commercialization and sustaining a workforce-development ecosystem.
Time will tell how this all trickles down. Remember also that chips themselves are reliant on supply chains of smaller parts and raw materials, and it can be a touch-and-go process. It’s never a trivial thing to modify or create a line.
It’s a good start, though. The successful semiconductor-cluster formula includes workforce development, clean water programs and next-generation energy, all in abundance, all good things.
So where do the chips fall today? Well, that 65-inch TV you snag on Black Friday won’t pack locally fabricated chips, but a decade from now, your kid may be producing the components that upgrade your home theater.
Until then, the supply chain has got your back! Manufacturers and distributors are adapting and making sure the shelf is stocked when you reach for the chips – chocolate or otherwise.
Heidi Anderson is the executive director of Stony Brook University’s Clean Energy Business Incubation Portal.
