Overview
The United States leads the world’s advanced microelectronics ecosystem through its dominance over design and intellectual property. However, unmatched IP is only one part of the vast and complex system of manufacturing and trade that makes up the global microelectronics ecosystem. This international supply chain is both crucial and vulnerable, making any disruption a serious threat to global security.
But which disruptions are most likely, and how should we prepare? Analyzing microelectronics trade flows requires overcoming significant hurdles of data availability and fragmentation around the extraction, exchange, and manufacture of key materials. And while some supply chain dependencies like the flow of rare earth minerals are widely understood, there are many other materials vital to advanced microelectronics that receive less attention.
To help analysts and policymakers recognize such key points of vulnerability and leverage, this paper (the first in a larger NSDPI series on this topic) analyzes the global dependency structure for 18 essential materials in the microelectronics supply chain. NSDPI researchers developed a methodological pipeline to unpack the complexity of these 18 materials’ origin and material flows, creating a statistical workflow that can be adapted into interactive visualizations and other tools that offer visibility into this system.
Commercial vendors and government agencies create huge volumes of data around microelectronics materials’ extraction and trade flows. However, this data is complex and fragmented. This project represents strong first steps in harmonizing this data to generate uniform coverage.
Key Takeaways
- Comparing Comtrade economic data flows with geographic resource data suggests key materials pass through multiple export points, which underscores the complexity of microelectronics supply chains.
- Many critical materials for advanced electronics originate as byproducts of other valuable materials like lead, zinc, and bauxite. This means the production of microelectronics components is also vulnerable to trade flows of otherwise unrelated paired materials.
- Reprocessing and reworking existing materials (such as recovering cobalt from waste and scrap) and optimizing industrial facilities can expand domestic and international supplies of key materials.