Asian craftsmanship etches a bright semiconductor future
Andrew Sheng says it is no coincidence that the best chip makers have long traditions in batik
Flying into Jakarta this week, I am reminded of the exotic blend between the ancient and the new that is Indonesia. Java is famous for its beautiful batik textiles, cotton fabric printed with superb designs from many cultures, from Indian patola patterns, and native Javanese bold block icons to Peranakan butterfly and bird prints.
This combination of old and new is reflected in the incoming government, comprising 72-year-old President-elect Prabowo Subianto, a former general, and 36-year old Vice-President-elect Gibran Raka Rakabuming, son of President Joko Widodo.
Their election manifesto promises to raise Indonesia’s annual economic growth to 8 per cent from 5 per cent, eradicate extreme poverty in two years, and continue the capital’s shift from Jakarta to Nusantara. This is a country using technology and economics to advance in the 21st century. But this is also built on a history of diverse cultures and superb craftsmanship.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-mostpopulous country, aims to become the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045. It has plans to upgrade its digital infrastructure and capabilities in line with the Making Indonesia 4.0 industrial road map.
According to the latest Global Innovation Index, Indonesia ranks 61st among 132 economies, up from 85th in 2020. Sooner or later, Indonesia will move into the semiconductor design or assembly field as silicon chips are the critical foundation of a digital economy.
Reading Chris Miller’s book to understand how semiconductors are changing our future, it struck me how their complex design and manufacturing process share similarities with Asian indigenous textile techniques like batik and ikat.
Silicon chips are basically integrated circuits that connect nodes where the electricity current switches, enabling binary digital information to be processed.
When Silicon Valley pioneers like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Texas Instruments improved on “wired transistors” in the 1960s, they avoided the hugely inefficient task of literally wiring (or soldering) different transistors together by putting different components on a single block of germanium.
By covering the block with black wax, and then selectively removing the wax, uncovered parts could interact with covered parts to generate positive/negative signals that form the basics of binary computing.
The next innovation came when wax was replaced by silicon dioxide on top of a slab of silicon and then “etching”, and later printing, the circuit by depositing lines of metal between different transistors within a single slab (today called a wafer because it involves layers of silicon connected horizontally and vertically). The whole process of miniaturisation and reliability was improved when lithographic printing was invented, essentially packing more transistors onto a single circuit.
Throughout East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, batik and ikat textiles are produced by weaving together horizontal and vertical lines of cotton or silk thread in a loom, and then dyeing the threads with different colours. In the batik process, the cloth is covered with wax, and the pattern is printed through a hot copper design block that melts the wax beneath.
When the cloth is then put into a vat of dye, only those parts where the wax has melted would be dyed. The process is repeated with different designs and dyes.
In simple terms, silicon circuits have to be “masked” before they are “printed”, using the most sophisticated lithographic machines mainly made by the Dutch company ASML. Indeed, any tourist who buys a cheap ikat textile would recognise that rough and crude tie and dye techniques end up with blurred “pixel” like images, whereas the finest cloth have 4K-like clarity because the finer the threads and designs, the sharper the final image.
One cannot help but make the connection with the world’s best chip manufacturers – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China all have long traditions of wax tie-and-dye textiles which demand great attention to detail. The best chips demand the finest workmanship and dedicated human engineering, as well as clustering or collective social groupings.
The same passion that produced the best batik or ikat textiles for centuries is producing the best semiconductor chips today. India, Central Asia and the Middle East all share the same textile traditions, so their potential in chip production cannot be underestimated.
It does not matter whether the best integrated circuit designs are from the United States; that such designs can be engineered in Asia is testimony to long traditions of dedicated craftsmanship.
All these suggest that the global supply chain of design, fabrication, fabless and outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing models will not decouple due to geopolitical sanctions or measures. They will simply evolve, innovate and adapt to changing demands.
As Miller brilliantly summed up in Chip War, semiconductor chips have military uses, but their explosion into daily lives came about through the consumer market.
You can restrict the intellectual property rights to 1- or 2-nanometre chips, but the number of such chips necessary to power the latest missiles or drones is small, whereas big numbers of 14nm or 28nm chips are needed for electric vehicles and digital home appliances. In the end, the mass producer will always overwhelm the small producer.
Scale is a quality that cannot be ignored. Those who understand history remember that time and opportunity move in cycles. The poor do not stay poor forever. And knowledge cannot be contained or confined to a few. That is why I am increasingly confident that the rest of the world will break out of their tech containment by an increasingly insecure West weaponising everything from artificial intelligence to chips.
The same passion that produced the best batik or ikat textiles for centuries is producing the best … chips today
Andrew Sheng is a former central banker who writes on global issues from an Asian perspective