It’s hard to think of a more globalised industry than chipmaking. The devices themselves probably do more air miles than any other product. Worth more than their weight in gold, air-freighting even half-finished chips from country to country makes sense. Wafers can start off on one continent, get despatched to a fab in Taiwan and then move on to a packaging plant on the other side of the South China Sea.
Now that multichip modules have become mainstream in phones and a growing portfolio of other products, a packaged memory could wind up being flown to a second packaging plant in a different country before it starts to make its way through the distribution chain and into a shipping container once final assembly has taken place.
At the end of 2019, it was hard to see that trend reversing even though China and US were coming to blows over the consequences of that globalisation: that strategically important technologies in effect belong to no-one. Faced with...