US President Joe Biden visited a Samsung semiconductor plant in South Korea on 20th May 2022 during his first Asia trip. That underlines the importance of semiconductors in today’s world. Also, we have been watching the news about the worldwide shortage of microchips since the middle of 2020 after the pandemic began.
So, what are these microchips? Well, the dictionary meaning of the word is a small piece of semiconductor material carrying many integrated circuits. An example of a semiconductor material is silicon. Microchips can be thought of as small pieces of silicon, containing electronic circuits built with transistors. A microchip of the size of a quarter dollar coin in the United States, that is, an area of approximately 0.72 square inches, can be packed with up to tens of billions of transistors. A computer processor or a smartphone processor are all microchips.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on June 30, 2022. Please read the full article here or here.