21712 - SCTE Broadband Nov2022 COMPLETE v1

15 Vol. 44 No. 4 - November 2022 Issue scte long read to 2016. Reasons for the jump include the increased adoption of smart devices, most obviously the iPhone and its Android competitors, but semiconductors are now present in cars, e-bikes, electric scooters, tvs, radios, home heating systems, doorbells, fitness trackers, laptops, gaming consoles, microwaves and even fridges. Anything falling into the category Internet of Things will contain hundreds of semiconductors each. The average car contains over 1000 semiconductors, and the average electric vehicle contains twice that. Like Disney+ and Zoom, we have fallen on these devices hungrily and can’t get enough of logging our temperatures, steps, calories, sleep, PBs and opinions on a daily basis, often hourly. We are addicted to connectivity. Just as our hunger for connected devices was peaking, Covid appeared around the corner, throwing a digital spanner in the works. The result was a well-documented, unprecedented rise in demand coupled with an unexpected decrease in supply. For example, in the last quarter of 2020, computer sales saw a 25% rise compared with the last quarter of 2019 at 90.3 million units (source: Canalys). As lockdown was in place it was obvious that to meet that need that a number of chip manufacturers were depleting existing inventories. Adding to the hunger for gadgets while lockdown rolled on, in recent years consumer demand for electric vehicles and solar panels also put pressure on supply chains, while the increasing calls for renewable energy - turbines, panels and so on - caused demand to rise at a point where supply was already stretched. According to the Semi-Conductor Association, (there truly is an association for absolutely anything if you look hard enough), “A single semiconductor chip has as many transistors as all of the stones in the Great Pyramid in Giza, and today there are more than 100 billion integrated circuits in daily use around the world—that’s equal to the number of stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy.” Worldwide revenue produced from semiconductor sales hit $470bn in 2020. A year later, in the middle of a global pandemic, they reached $595bn. In 2022 that figure was $676bn. That’s a 43% increase in 2 years. The SCA tells us that semiconductors are generally produced from pure elements such as silicon or germanium, or compounds such as gallium arsenide. These elements are produced into semiconductors almost exclusively in Asia; 60% in China, 19% in Korea and 21% in Taiwan. Contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t the mining of precious metals found in semiconductors that caused the bottlenecks. It was Semiconductor sales worldwide in billions $. Credit: Semi-Conductor Association