Semiconductors and Nanoelectronic Chips

Ubiquitous chips become critical technologies for the digital growth, industrial strength, and strategic independence of any country. The AI revolution is driving the tremendous demand for lower-power and higher-performance logic chips and memories. AI drastically reshapes the semiconductor market, which is expected to exponentially grow in the forthcoming years, e.g., by a factor between 3 to 5 in the next decade. The growing strategic and economic significance of AI turns the chip supply chain into a geopolitical asset, from the extraction and refining of raw materials to the advanced chip packaging. Semiconductors and its current fragmented supply chain are now considered as core security infrastructure for any country security. Therefore, any country or group of countries currently deploys strategic policies to control parts of this complex semiconductor supply chain, bearing in mind that the overall control of the supply chain by a single country is strictly impossible. This book highlights the technological challenges for producing more energy-efficient and higher-performance AI chips – logic devices, memories, advanced packaging, optical circuits, power and analog components. It also describes the vulnerabilities of the chip supply chain, the country efforts to re-shore parts of its supply chain, and the sustainability issues related to the huge increase in semiconductor manufacturing capacity. This book is recommended to a broad technological and societal world: students, researchers, technologists, industrialists, economists, financial and policy makers.