OPINION | A snip on the global chip shortage

Ever since the last months of 2020, vehicle manufacturers have been battling a global shortage of semiconductor “chips”, otherwise known as integrated circuits. These are thin wafers of semiconductor material, usually silicon, incorporating huge numbers (currently into the tens of milliards) of transistors on a piece of material scarcely bigger than a human thumbnail.   

This is only possible if the transistors are extremely small. At present they have got the size down to 5 nanometres, that is 5 millionths of a millimetre. For comparison, the thickness of a human hair is about 100,000 nanometres and the smallest viruses floating around in the air around us are about 20 nanometres in size. Chips consist of as many as 100 layers of materials. These are deposited, then partially removed, to form complex three-dimensional structures that connect all the tiny transistors. Some of these layers are just one atom thin. (The size of a silicon atom is 0.21 nanometres).   

Everything in the modern world that needs to process data or make computations contains one or more chips. On cars they are used for things like digital displays, entertainment systems, assisted parking, and, critically, for the engine control module. Not surprisingly, a shortage of chips has paralysed the auto industry, leading to long lines of cars waiting for their chips before they can go to the showrooms.   

Unfortunately, it is blindingly expensive to build new chip-making plants, because making chips is incredibly difficult. As they say in the industry, “It's not rocket science — it's much more difficult”.

If there is one good thing that has come out of this saga (which is expected to continue at least until the end of 2022), it is that certain manufacturers have started to strip out some of the most absurd hi-tech features with which they had burdened their cars.   

It will no doubt be a mere blip on the upward curve of increasing complexity, but perhaps a future historian will record that in 2022 people realised briefly that a car is not a mobile entertainment centre.  

Gerrit Burger is Sowetan Motoring’s resident technical expert. Contact him with your mechanical queries on geb@mweb.co.za