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...and reveal why even infusions of cash from the U.S. and European Union won’t solve it

Dozens of container ships sit off the coast of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California, waiting to be unloaded, in this photo from October 2021.

From PlayStations to Porsches, many consumer products have been hit by a chip shortage that began choking the global economy in 2020 and continues today. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tweeted last month. “The semiconductor supply chain is very fragile, and it’s going to remain that way until we can increase chip production.” Congress is poised to fund a US $52 billion silicon incentive package, as part of the America COMPETES Act, aiming to increase U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, while the European Union last week outlined their own €43 billion chip-shortage-ameliorating package.

Appreciating the vastness of the chip supply grid The components in a semiconductor can travel well over 50,000 kilometers and cross more than 70 international borders before a chip finally reaches its end customer, according to a 2020 report by the Global Semiconductor Alliance. “The metaphor of a supply chain simply doesn't apply here,” says George Calhoun, director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Center at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New York. “It’s an incredibly complicated global ecosystem, with some points in that grid that are critically important.” One key point of vulnerability is the Netherlands, where the photolithography leader ASML Holding produces the only extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines in the world. Another is Taiwan, where three firms produce over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced (5-nanometer and 7-nanometer) semiconductors. However, globalization in itself is no bad thing, according to a 2021 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). It estimated that moving to a self-sufficient local semiconductor supply chain could take the United States a decade, cost a trillion dollars, and increase semiconductor prices by up to 65 percent. Recognizing a fab-capacity shortcoming that predated the chip shortage The semiconductor industry has always been cyclical, undergoing gluts and shortages as the market for personal computers, and then home electronics and smartphones, followed the ebb and flow of the global economy. But even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, there were signs that the “market was very, very tight,” says Russell Harrison, director of government relations at IEEE-USA. Semiconductor factories (a.k.a. fabrication facilities, or fabs) typically run at about 80 percent of their rated capacity, allowing time for maintenance, upgrades, and staffing variations. As early as the summer of 2019, the industry-wide utilization level was nearing 90 percent. That is a reflection, says Calhoun, of a growing appetite for connected home appliances and increasingly sophisticated automated driving features and digital connectivity in cars. Utilization hasn’t fallen below 90 percent since the summer of 2020, according to the SIA. Revealing the lost inventory backlog Just as demand for semiconductors began outstripping supply, the pandemic made it a perfect storm. Every part of the supply ecosystem was hit, from the sourcing of raw materials to the complex global logistics for moving components around and getting finished chips to customers. Last month, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a report from a survey of over 150 companies in the semiconductor supply chain, including nearly every major chipmaker, and consumers such as Google, Ford, and Verizon. The report noted that the median inventory of semiconductor products fell from 40 days in 2019 to less than 5 days in 2021, leaving these companies vulnerable to even the slightest extra setback. “And that's probably a bit of a bogus average,” says Calhoun. “It’s like the old saying that the river is six inches deep on average, but you can still drown in the middle of it.” Deepest underwater are those companies relying on heavily disrupted “legacy nodes”: not the cutting-edge hardware found in laptops but older, less sophisticated, and analog chips that are nevertheless critical for medical devices, broadband, and autos. “Those chips aren't as profitable and are certainly not as prestigious, so companies aren’t investing in them,” says Harrison. Comparing U.S. and China fabrication and R&D data “If we want to compete globally, we invest domestically, and specifically in revitalizing the semiconductor industry,” Commerce Secretary Raimondo said last fall, while noting that the United States has slumped from a 40 percent share of the global chip production in the 1990s to 12 percent last year—and now lags well behind China. “Every day we wait is a day we fall further behind,” she added. To the rest of the world, however, the U.S. semiconductor industry appears anything but moribund. While the United States does have fewer fabs than China (and many fewer than Taiwan), it continues to dominate in the most valuable parts of the semiconductor industry—such as the design and development of new semiconductors as well as the machinery to build them. China, meanwhile, remains a net importer of semiconductors, largely from the United States, to the tune of $350 billion in chips in 2020. The United States is also significantly outspending China in research and development, dedicating $39 billion to it last year, according to the SIA. Contextualizing the semiconductor incentives in the America COMPETES Act If the United States is already a healthily profitable global leader in semiconductors, does it need the COMPETES Act’s $52 billion set aside for semiconductors—an incentive package bigger than 2009’s General Motors bailout? “It won’t fix the short-term problem, obviously,” says Harrison, as fabs take years to build and spin up. “But if companies are looking around the world where to put a plant, I think it helps.” Even without those funds, some of the biggest semiconductor companies are already planning large U.S. fabs. Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the “pure-play” fab Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have recently announced fab projects in Texas, Ohio, and Arizona totaling $99 billion. Intel suggests its Ohio plant may grow to a $100 billion investment over the next 10 years—but only if it receives government assistance. Globally, Calhoun calculates that private-sector investments will bring over $850 billion to bear on chip shortages in the years ahead. “It's a huge number that makes $52 billion look like just a little extra, even if it were invested perfectly, and not, as you might assume, to come out of the government sausage machine in a not fully effective fashion,” he says.

The components in a semiconductor can travel well over 50,000 kilometers and cross more than 70 international borders before a chip finally reaches its end customer, according to a 2020 report by the Global Semiconductor Alliance. “The metaphor of a supply chain simply doesn't apply here,” says George Calhoun, director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Center at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New York. “It’s an incredibly complicated global ecosystem, with some points in that grid that are critically important.” One key point of vulnerability is the Netherlands, where the photolithography leader ASML Holding produces the only extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines in the world. Another is Taiwan, where three firms produce over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced (5-nanometer and 7-nanometer) semiconductors. However, globalization in itself is no bad thing, according to a 2021 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). It estimated that moving to a self-sufficient local semiconductor supply chain could take the United States a decade, cost a trillion dollars, and increase semiconductor prices by up to 65 percent.

The semiconductor industry has always been cyclical, undergoing gluts and shortages as the market for personal computers, and then home electronics and smartphones, followed the ebb and flow of the global economy. But even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, there were signs that the “market was very, very tight,” says Russell Harrison, director of government relations at IEEE-USA. Semiconductor factories (a.k.a. fabrication facilities, or fabs) typically run at about 80 percent of their rated capacity, allowing time for maintenance, upgrades, and staffing variations. As early as the summer of 2019, the industry-wide utilization level was nearing 90 percent. That is a reflection, says Calhoun, of a growing appetite for connected home appliances and increasingly sophisticated automated driving features and digital connectivity in cars. Utilization hasn’t fallen below 90 percent since the summer of 2020, according to the SIA.

Just as demand for semiconductors began outstripping supply, the pandemic made it a perfect storm. Every part of the supply ecosystem was hit, from the sourcing of raw materials to the complex global logistics for moving components around and getting finished chips to customers. Last month, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a report from a survey of over 150 companies in the semiconductor supply chain, including nearly every major chipmaker, and consumers such as Google, Ford, and Verizon. The report noted that the median inventory of semiconductor products fell from 40 days in 2019 to less than 5 days in 2021, leaving these companies vulnerable to even the slightest extra setback. “And that's probably a bit of a bogus average,” says Calhoun. “It’s like the old saying that the river is six inches deep on average, but you can still drown in the middle of it.” Deepest underwater are those companies relying on heavily disrupted “legacy nodes”: not the cutting-edge hardware found in laptops but older, less sophisticated, and analog chips that are nevertheless critical for medical devices, broadband, and autos. “Those chips aren't as profitable and are certainly not as prestigious, so companies aren’t investing in them,” says Harrison.

“If we want to compete globally, we invest domestically, and specifically in revitalizing the semiconductor industry,” Commerce Secretary Raimondo said last fall, while noting that the United States has slumped from a 40 percent share of the global chip production in the 1990s to 12 percent last year—and now lags well behind China. “Every day we wait is a day we fall further behind,” she added. To the rest of the world, however, the U.S. semiconductor industry appears anything but moribund. While the United States does have fewer fabs than China (and many fewer than Taiwan), it continues to dominate in the most valuable parts of the semiconductor industry—such as the design and development of new semiconductors as well as the machinery to build them. China, meanwhile, remains a net importer of semiconductors, largely from the United States, to the tune of $350 billion in chips in 2020. The United States is also significantly outspending China in research and development, dedicating $39 billion to it last year, according to the SIA.

If the United States is already a healthily profitable global leader in semiconductors, does it need the COMPETES Act’s $52 billion set aside for semiconductors—an incentive package bigger than 2009’s General Motors bailout? “It won’t fix the short-term problem, obviously,” says Harrison, as fabs take years to build and spin up. “But if companies are looking around the world where to put a plant, I think it helps.” Even without those funds, some of the biggest semiconductor companies are already planning large U.S. fabs. Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the “pure-play” fab Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have recently announced fab projects in Texas, Ohio, and Arizona totaling $99 billion. Intel suggests its Ohio plant may grow to a $100 billion investment over the next 10 years—but only if it receives government assistance. Globally, Calhoun calculates that private-sector investments will bring over $850 billion to bear on chip shortages in the years ahead. “It's a huge number that makes $52 billion look like just a little extra, even if it were invested perfectly, and not, as you might assume, to come out of the government sausage machine in a not fully effective fashion,” he says.

This article appears in the April 2022 print issue as “5 Charts That Explain the Global Chip Shortage.”

Mark Harris is an investigative science and technology reporter based in Seattle, with a particular interest in robotics, transportation, green technologies, and medical devices. He’s on Twitter at @meharris  and email at mark(at)meharris(dot)com. Email or DM for Signal number for sensitive/encrypted messaging. 

In every layer of the semiconductor value chain, there is monopoly. How to over come it should be our topic of discussion so that we can find solution to shorten supply chain and intensify competition for addressing chip shortage. Here is further to it: https://www.the-waves.org/2022/03/18/semiconductor-monopoly-due-to-winning-race-of-ideas/

The century-old quest for truly realistic sound production is finally paying off

Now that recorded sound has become ubiquitous, we hardly think about it. From our smartphones, smart speakers, TVs, radios, disc players, and car sound systems, it’s an enduring and enjoyable presence in our lives. In 2017, a survey by the polling firm Nielsen suggested that some 90 percent of the U.S. population listens to music regularly and that, on average, they do so 32 hours per week.

Behind this free-flowing pleasure are enormous industries applying technology to the long-standing goal of reproducing sound with the greatest possible realism. From Edison’s phonograph and the horn speakers of the 1880s, successive generations of engineers in pursuit of this ideal invented and exploited countless technologies: triode vacuum tubes, dynamic loudspeakers, magnetic phonograph cartridges, solid-state amplifier circuits in scores of different topologies, electrostatic speakers, optical discs, stereo, and surround sound. And over the past five decades, digital technologies, like audio compression and streaming, have transformed the music industry.

And yet even now, after 150 years of development, the sound we hear from even a high-end audio system falls far short of what we hear when we are physically present at a live music performance. At such an event, we are in a natural sound field and can readily perceive that the sounds of different instruments come from different locations, even when the sound field is criss-crossed with mixed sound from multiple instruments. There’s a reason why people pay considerable sums to hear live music: It is more enjoyable, exciting, and can generate a bigger emotional impact.

To hear the author's 3D Soundstage audio for yourself, grab your headphones and head over to 3dsoundstage.com/ieee.

Today, researchers, companies, and entrepreneurs, including ourselves, are closing in at last on recorded audio that truly re-creates a natural sound field. The group includes big companies, such as Apple and Sony, as well as smaller firms, such as Creative. Netflix recently disclosed a partnership with Sennheiser under which the network has begun using a new system, Ambeo 2-Channel Spatial Audio, to heighten the sonic realism of such TV shows as “Stranger Things” and “The Witcher.”

There are now at least half a dozen different approaches to producing highly realistic audio. We use the term “soundstage” to distinguish our work from other audio formats, such as the ones referred to as spatial audio or immersive audio. These can represent sound with more spatial effect than ordinary stereo, but they do not typically include the detailed sound-source location cues that are needed to reproduce a truly convincing sound field.

We believe that soundstage is the future of music recording and reproduction. But before such a sweeping revolution can occur, it will be necessary to overcome an enormous obstacle: that of conveniently and inexpensively converting the countless hours of existing recordings, regardless of whether they’re mono, stereo, or multichannel surround sound (5.1, 7.1, and so on). No one knows exactly how many songs have been recorded, but according to the entertainment-metadata concern Gracenote, more than 200 million recorded songs are available now on planet Earth. Given that the average duration of a song is about 3 minutes, this is the equivalent of about 1,100 years of music.

After separating a recording into its component tracks, the next step is to remix them into a soundstage recording. This is accomplished by a soundstage signal processor. This soundstage processor performs a complex computational function to generate the output signals that drive the speakers and produce the soundstage audio. The inputs to the generator include the isolated tracks, the physical locations of the speakers, and the desired locations of the listener and sound sources in the re-created sound field. The outputs of the soundstage processor are multitrack signals, one for each channel, to drive the multiple speakers.

The sound field can be in a physical space, if it is generated by speakers, or in a virtual space, if it is generated by headphones or earphones. The function performed within the soundstage processor is based on computational acoustics and psychoacoustics, and it takes into account sound-wave propagation and interference in the desired sound field and the HRTFs for the listener and the desired sound field.

For example, if the listener is going to use earphones, the generator selects a set of HRTFs based on the configuration of desired sound-source locations, then uses the selected HRTFs to filter the isolated sound-source tracks. Finally, the soundstage processor combines all the HRTF outputs to generate the left and right tracks for earphones. If the music is going to be played back on speakers, at least two are needed, but the more speakers, the better the sound field. The number of sound sources in the re-created sound field can be more or less than the number of speakers.

We released our first soundstage app, for the iPhone, in 2020. It lets listeners configure, listen to, and save soundstage music in real time—the processing causes no discernible time delay. The app, called 3D Musica, converts stereo music from a listener’s personal music library, the cloud, or even streaming music to soundstage in real time. (For karaoke, the app can remove vocals, or output any isolated instrument.)

Earlier this year, we opened a Web portal, 3dsoundstage.com, that provides all the features of the 3D Musica app in the cloud plus an application programming interface (API) making the features available to streaming music providers and even to users of any popular Web browser. Anyone can now listen to music in soundstage audio on essentially any device.

When sound travels to your ears, unique characteristics of your head—its physical shape, the shape of your outer and inner ears, even the shape of your nasal cavities—change the audio spectrum of the original sound.

We also developed separate versions of the 3D Soundstage software for vehicles and home audio systems and devices to re-create a 3D sound field using two, four, or more speakers. Beyond music playback, we have high hopes for this technology in videoconferencing. Many of us have had the fatiguing experience of attending videoconferences in which we had trouble hearing other participants clearly or being confused about who was speaking. With soundstage, the audio can be configured so that each person is heard coming from a distinct location in a virtual room. Or the “location” can simply be assigned depending on the person’s position in the grid typical of Zoom and other videoconferencing applications. For some, at least, videoconferencing will be less fatiguing and speech will be more intelligible.

Just as audio moved from mono to stereo, and from stereo to surround and spatial audio, it is now starting to move to soundstage. In those earlier eras, audiophiles evaluated a sound system by its fidelity, based on such parameters as bandwidth, harmonic distortion, data resolution, response time, lossless or lossy data compression, and other signal-related factors. Now, soundstage can be added as another dimension to sound fidelity—and, we dare say, the most fundamental one. To human ears, the impact of soundstage, with its spatial cues and gripping immediacy, is much more significant than incremental improvements in fidelity. This extraordinary feature offers capabilities previously beyond the experience of even the most deep-pocketed audiophiles.

Technology has fueled previous revolutions in the audio industry, and it is now launching another one. Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and digital signal processing are tapping in to psychoacoustics to give audio enthusiasts capabilities they’ve never had. At the same time, these technologies are giving recording companies and artists new tools that will breathe new life into old recordings and open up new avenues for creativity. At last, the century-old goal of convincingly re-creating the sounds of the concert hall has been achieved.

This article appears in the October 2022 print issue as “How Audio Is Getting Its Groove Back.”