The world can be divided, within computationality, into before and after semiconductors. These tiny "animals" replaced the heavy valves and managed to master all modern technology.
So much so that the term "bug" predates these fantastic pieces: in the age of electromechanical computers, bugs entered the machine to heat up, passed between electrical parts and caused a short circuit, paralyzing the computational machine.
The second revolution, starting in 1980, was the introduction of the "personal computer" PCs by IBM. With miniaturized processing and the innovative computational concept, which left programming below level, namely assembler, for high level, structured, such as pascal, cobol and C, it made computing palatable to the common user.
By the way, the biggest revolution in the late 1980s, 20th century (and again, the revolutionary things going on in this particular decade) was structured programming C: Until today this programming is the foundation of everything. Whether by concept, by way of structuring. Unix, linux, embedded electronic systems use this language to this day.
To get an idea, in 1990, more than three quarters of chip production took place in Europe or the United States. It was a status symbol of technological mastery. During the cold war, it was nuclear bombs, then, in the information age, it dominated the design and construction of semiconductors. Of that, until today, Intel and AMD.
In the 21st century, with the greater need for manufacturing, and with the offer of cheaper factories in Asia, Asian countries established aggressive subsidy policies for the construction of “fabs”, as the semiconductor plants are called.
China is expected to become the world's biggest chip producer by the end of this decade.
Currently, giants like Apple and Qualcomm design their chips in the United States, but outsource the manufacturing to specialist makers in Asia.
One of the rare exceptions is Intel, which still concentrates most of its production on American soil.
In the case of the most advanced chips, used in computers and smartphones, basically all production depends on two companies: TSMC, from Taiwan, and Samsung, from South Korea.
This dependence has become an urgent matter with the scarcity of recent months. In mid-April, with a piece of silicon in hand, US President Joe Biden said the country urgently needed investments.
“These chips, these wafers, batteries, broadband – it's all infrastructure,” said Biden. Wafer is the name of the silicon slices that are the initial raw material for the manufacture of chips.
There is also strong pressure on real miners: the demand for substrates, for raw materials is not overcoming the rise either. Items such as gold, aluminum, silver, copper, silicon and lead, among others, have risen in the main exchanges in the world, as the miners, extractors and processors still feel the brunt of the pandemic in their extraction sites and are not prepared to fold production.
Imagine: to increase the production of a semiconductor IC, you need to allocate more robots and increase water and electrical uptake, something simple when compared to bringing excavators the size of a 4-story building, digging a hole in the ground and praying to find another came from manganese, bauxite, copper ore. for example.
Real mining, unlike minecraft, takes a lot of time, a lot of cost, with a very high degree of uncertainty. Mining companies do not invest if they are unsure of a return. Therefore, this investment is measured every five years.
The European Union's highest authority on industrial affairs, Commissioner Thierry Breton, said last week that the bloc was "too naive" in allowing production to leave the continent.
The EU announced in March a plan to more than double the production capacity of microchips by 2030, with investments of around $170 billion.
Bitmain giant was looking to increase its efficiency and speed in cryptocurrency mining. Called TMSC to view the necessary ASICS.
TMSC started making the chips this year and expected to finish production in early 2022. It has now revised the forecast for 2023. It is unknown how much of the company's supply was purchased by Bitmain, but an increase in its production of chips from 55,000 to 60,000 pieces, and wafer chips per month from 110,000 to 120,000. Now there is great uncertainty.
Pressure on demand from processors pushed up the price of these now rare parts. The resumption of production should take place by the end of 2023.
Until then, however, the industry has to deal with the shortage. The most affected is the automaker. It is estimated that the volume of cars produced in the first quarter of the year was 5% below the same period last year.
Not even extra inventories for key components, such as processors, were able to prevent industry disruptions. (The forecast of a drop in sales due to the pandemic and the consequent reduction in orders did not help either.)
"I was shocked at how much I learned about our supplier base," Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Wall Street Journal.
The gradual transition to electric vehicles – which are especially reliant on digital technology – points to a dramatic transformation in the automakers' business.
The idea of “just in time” manufacturing, an extremely efficient supply chain, begins to give way to verticalization.
Automakers won't make their own chips, of course, but for components like batteries it's a different story.
The same can happen with the products most obviously associated with chips: electronics.
In its latest earnings release, Sony said it is failing to meet demand for the PS5 console, "especially because of hurdles in the supply of semiconductors."
And in this context, one enters with the GPU cards.
The lack of semiconductors will largely limit the expansion of cryptomining for the next year.
Not just for the GPU, but also for the ASICS issue. Anyway, anything that has some kind of controller, based on wafers, on which there is processing, to mine, will suffer.
The interesting part is that the mining algorithm, when feeling this "lack", ended up facilitating the rewards for the mines.
In any case, prices will rise, both in the necessary hardware and in the issuance of cryptocurrencies.
Recently, even Intel, one of the biggest makers of the product, has admitted that it will take "a few years" for the industry to rebalance. "We have a few years before we can meet this growing demand," company president Pat Gelsinger told US TV channel CBS.
Experts speak of at least two years of shortage.
But the worst is yet to come: the problems also affect the food industry, agriculture and in general the way to feed 8 billion people across the globe!
Also, announced this week, the critical threshold for the collapse of maritime currents in the Atlantic Ocean.
The reader may ask, what does one thing have to do with the other? All!
Greater pressure for industrial exploration and production will affect an already very fragile environmental system!
If the next few years will be scarce in terms of industrial production, they will also be scarce in the world in terms of water, food and climate!
These next two years should be a post pandemic reflection in all aspects!
Opportunities will always exist. At what cost, it will depend on us!
And not just material cost, something to think about......
Because, as things go, a drilled water well will be more expensive than an oil well!
A crop of carrots and tomatoes will be worth more than Ifarm tokens!
A chicken laying eggs or a cow producing milk will be a better investment than bitcoin!
Bitcoin, ethereum, ASICS do not satiate hunger!
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