Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399159
Fall 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 37 Specialized machinery is used to integrate components that would be far too small for the human hand to manipulate. This is a delicate task. The slightest contamination of dust is enough to disrupt the process. And so the machinery is housed in air-tight clean rooms and a conveyer system is used to pass components from clean room to clean room, so as to prevent any chance of contamination. This sort of assembly line is expensive to manufacture and it is common for semiconductor fabrication plant construction costs to reach four billion dollars. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's most valuable semiconductor company, estimates that its upcoming facility may reach costs of twenty billion. Despite these exorbitant costs, fabrication plants are relatively short-term investments. The fabrication designs used in each plant are often obsolete within just a few years. As our need for faster and smarter devices grows, so do the demands we place on any given circuit board. A practical example is the 3.5-inch spinning disk hard drive. Fifteen years ago, these drives were commonly sold in units measuring in the gigabytes. Today, you can buy an 18-terabyte drive that conforms to the exact same size and specifi cation. Increasing the data storage by that amount without changing the size required that more transistors—components used to conduct electrical currents—be packed into the same space. In fact, it has commonly held true that the number of transistors in a densely integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years. And this principle applies across the entire spectrum of electrical manufacturing. Smartphones, tablets, personal computers, televisions, gaming devices, cars, and anything else you can think of with a screen or plug. Therefore, each multi-billion-dollar facility only has a short window of time before they are manufacturing hardware that is no longer in wide demand. By the time one facility begins production, its replacement is already being built. It is a constant race to put up the next plant in time to keep up with innovation. Then the pandemic hit and everything stopped. Demand for electronic devices skyrocketed. COVID-19 forced us to become more reliant on our phones and computers than ever before. Schools raced to send hundreds of thousands of laptops and tablets home with students in order to enable remote learning. Companies were forced to set up infrastructure in their employees' homes. Assets had to be distributed via the cloud like never before. All of this required record amounts of hardware. And all the while, production on new fabrication plants had shut down. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC—the three largest suppliers of semiconductors globally—all have new plants in various stages of construction, with plans for additional plants being rushed into action to catch up with demand. In the meantime, we fi nd ourselves in a defi cit. The gaming industry fi nds itself caught between two hardware generations as Sony and Microsoft's new consoles remain diffi cult to procure at market value nearly a year after their launch. High-end graphics cards, essential to gaming, video processing, and crypto-mining alike, are impossible to fi nd in stores, with scalpers charging more than double suggested retail value on sites like eBay. The dwindling supply of high-capacity media drives has already forced data storage costs to rise. However, auto manufacturers