Dan Reinhard

Minot

When the first transistor was invented at the Bell Laboratories in 1947, it would be unfathomable for those engineers to imagine how that basic electronic switch could evolve into what it has become today. In discrete form back in the 1950-60s, a single transistor was roughly the physical size of a small bottle cap. Through continuous improvements to the transistor technology that is utilized in integrated circuit (IC) design, from Small Scale Integration (SSI), Medium Scale Integration (MSI) that has exponentially evolved from Large Scale Integration (LSI) with several thousand transistors to Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) with more than one billion transistors on a postage stamp size piece of silicon. Nowadays, those IC chips are used everywhere from toilets to laptops and from a kitchen blender to a car.

The IC chip was first used in the automobile industry in 1968 with the Volkswagen electronic fuel injection (EFI) systems. Today’s vehicles, require somewhere between 50-150 IC chips in the manufacturing process of an internal combustion powered vehicle -and the scariest of all, is the 1,400-3,000 IC chips that are used in battery powered vehicles! So I guess, due to stringent EPA regulations for internal combustion engines and the battery powered fanciful dream car (within the Green New Deal), IC chip technologies are here to stay and as necessary as tires on your car or pickup…just not as many.

But why are just about every new car dealer’s display lots nearly void of new vehicles recently? There were several disastrous events that happened in the extremely expensive and complex chip manufacturing process around the world. First came COVID pandemic causing extreme delays in the manufacturing process. Second, a manufacturing plant in Japan, which produces around one-third of the IC chips, nearly burned down by a fire. Third, due to so many stay at home kids and parents during the pandemic, laptops, computers and cellphone sales skyrocketed. All those devices use many IC chips. Fourth, I do not believe that the US car manufacturers correctly predicted the quantity of sales for new vehicles and did not place sufficient quantities of chips on order. Lastly, just about all IC chips come from Asia with very little manufactured in the US.

In the mid-70’s, I visited a Motorola IC chip manufacturing plant in Arizona to observe the complexity of the process. The “cleanrooms” could not have a minuscule fraction of a micron of dust in the air. All other environmental parameters had stringent controls during the process. But the hardest to believe was the time required from the initial setup to the final stage of production which could take between 6 months to a year. Sadly, our chip shortages will cost many millions (billions?) of dollars in new vehicle sales lost in 2021 and possibly in 2022.

I know that the Senate (stalled in Congress) has approved around $52 billion dollars to rebuild our failing chip manufacturing capabilities but that process will take several years to reach fruition. And large production will only happen if they can find enough rare earth minerals that China mostly controls throughout the world… Till then, I advise you to take extraordinary good care of your very valuable combustion engine vehicle…