Inside, these fancy electronic products are tiny but powerful ‘brains’, made up of several microscopic integrated circuits (ICs) called microchips, which are embossed on semiconductors. 

What Are Semiconductors?

Semiconductors are materials that are neither good conductors (generally metals) nor good insulators (like ceramics) of electricity, but halfway between them, and can be altered as needed to become either (or both). They can be pure elements like silicon or germanium, or compounds like gallium arsenide or cadmium selenide.

What’s A Microchip?

A microchip is a lattice of electronic circuits with miniature transistors, resistors, diodes and capacitors at every node acting as switches that can turn an electrical current (and hence information exchange) on or off, embossed on a wafer of silicon, which is a semiconductor. 

Sliced into a wafer for miniaturisation, silicon’s conducting property can be altered or reversed by introducing impurities in its crystal structure.

While silicon, the most commonly used semiconductor material, is available everywhere, other semiconductor materials like germanium and gallium arsenide, which have specific uses, are rare.

Where Are Microchips Used?

Currently, there are four main types of microchips: Logic chips, memory chips, application-specific integrated chips (ASICs) and system-on-chips (SoCs). 

The first two are the most common, and both are digital, storing information using transistors. The last two are a mix of analogue and digital and deployed to perform specialised tasks.

Chips are used in the Central Processing Units of computers, as well as cellphones, routers, modems, TVs, game consoles, medical devices, etc. Increasingly, they are being used in white goods like washing machines, refrigerators, cars and even industrial processers in factories.

They are also critical to the defence industry, and are used in systems like missile guidance systems as well as flight and vehicle control platforms.

What Are Different Chip Sizes?

The size of a microchip is measured in nanometres. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. In the world of chips, small is (generally) beautiful, in as much as for most commercial applications, miniaturisation leads to greater efficiency and performance.

Hence, there’s a global race to develop smaller chips, and the associated fabrication system to manufacture them.

The US is still the global leader in this development (and miniaturisation) of chips, with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China playing catch up. 

However, over the years, the US has kept outsourcing the manufacture of chips to these countries. This naturally involves the transfer of the technology for fabricating the chips, making the technology susceptible to reverse engineering by the manufacturing country, a big concern for the US, especially vis-à-vis China.

Headlines from 2022 highlighted how the US placed curbs on the export of fab technology to China for chips that are 14 nano-metres (nm) or smaller, while those from 2023 said the country had continued to export equipment for the fabrication of 14 nm chips to China well into the following year. 

As the race for the smallest chip heated up, Chinese telecom giant Huawei announced late into 2023 that it had cracked the fabrication of the 7 nm chip using a process different from the American one, which it went on to use in its Mate 60 Pro smartphone. 

By October 2024, another Chinese tech biggie Xiaomi, which has already ventured into EVs and AI products, announced it had designed its own 3 nm chip (although manufacturing it will take more time), putting China a step or two behind the US and Taiwan in the miniaturisation race.

To put this in perspective, India’s first chip fab, in partnership with Taiwan’s PSMC (Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation), is slated to begin manufacturing 28 nm chips, by December 2026. 

Chips for Defence

For most commercial applications, smaller is better. However, this mantra doesn’t quite work in the critical defence industry. 

Chips used in defence are manufactured separately, often with different specifications. Defence industries require chips that are resilient to extreme conditions like high temperatures and pressures. Think of the Mach 2-6 speeds at which fighter jets, drones and missiles travel. 

Also, with expensive fighter jets, drones, missiles and submarines all undergoing long development and gestation periods, as well as having longer lifespans, there is a need for back-ups and spare parts throughout their entire lifecycle. 

As a result, R&D for chips built for defence use can’t (and don’t) take part in the miniaturisation race. Instead, their focus is on stability, performance and resistance to hacking and duplication.

The manufacture of chips for use in the defence industries is thus an entirely different vertical, often unconnected with the commercial chip R&D space.

Future of Chips

In the future, chips are expected to advance on many fronts. And Moore’s Law — the 1965 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double each year (revised by him to doubling every two years in 1975) — may no longer remain the main guiding principle of the industry.

That’s because the industry’s focus has already shifted to higher performance, for which alternative pathways are being explored, like:

• New materials and stacking: On the miniaturisation side, replacing silicon with gallium nitride or carbon nanotubes is expected to grow, along with stacking chips using new techniques. Both strategies are expected to allow for smaller, denser circuits.
• Specialisation: Chips are likely to become more specialised. Instead of a general-purpose CPU, we will see chips designed for AI, etc (chips for image processing, aka GPUs (graphics processing units), are already a reality — which is also expected to improve performance significantly.
• Neuromorphic chips: Chips that mimic the structure and function of neurons in the human brain are in the works, and are expected to revolutionise AI.

Microchips are here to stay. Which direction their development and usage takes, is yet to be revealed. Meanwhile, let us enjoy asking Alexa or Siri to carry out our chores!

This is the first of a two-part series. Part 2 will focus on the road ahead for India’s chip fab dreams, and its hopes of playing catch-up with China