stores data about what you bought and runs the software

on your laptop.

These chips have come to power our lives, and only a handful

of fabrication plants or fabs in the world have the know-how

and infrastructure to make them.

So most of the chips are produced outside of the US

like at this fab in Singapore

- The bill of fab is a big investment.

- [Narrator] And now the world is running out of chips

because companies can't make them fast enough.

- When order really flooding in.

We had to turn on every single piece

of machine that we can find in the factory.

- [Narrator] The pandemic rattled supply chains

and led to a surge in demand for electronics

when people were stuck at home.

While a perfect storm of natural disasters,

a fire at one of the world's leading auto chip makers

and the ongoing US-China trade war disrupted the production

and distribution of semiconductors.

This shortage has affected whether you can drive a Jeep

off the lot or buy a new PlayStation 5.

We visit one of the world's largest contract chip makers

to see the complex process

and why there's no quick fix to the supply crunch.

- Chip usually it takes about two to three months to make.

- [Narrator] Daniel Rajkumar is a manufacturing manager

at one of the fabs at Global Foundries.

The American company is the third largest contract

chip manufacturer in the world.

Companies like Intel, AMD and Bosch

give some of their circuitry designs to Global Foundries.

And then it's fabs like this one in Singapore

manufacture the chips.

- Once we finish the fabrication of the circuitry,

it has to go for testing.

It has to go for repackaging.

- [Narrator] Altogether it could take as much as six months

before a chip is ready to go into your tech.

This long process starts here,

at the center of the fab called the clean room.

- Before going into the clean room,

we need to gown up.

- [Narrator] Because chips can be as small as a fingernail

and crammed with billions of components,

they have to be handled with great care.

- Any form of dust that falls onto the wafers

you will cause the chip to be the defective.

And then now we are able to go into the air shower.

Okay.

- [Narrator] Global Foundries says this clean room

is a thousand times cleaner than an operating room.

And it also takes up a lot of space.

- Two footballs field.

That's how big it is.

We have about seven to 800 machines.

- [Narrator] It's also yellow in here

because chips are sensitive to UV rays.

And this lighting has none of that.

- This is always the first step.

- [Narrator] The starter material for any chip

is here in this room.

These super thin disks are called wafers

and made from silicon.

Eventually one of these will produce about 1000

to 1500 individual chips.

But before it does, the wafer is placed

in a special container.

- We have the raw silicon.

We are now trying to register this material

and translate into our wafer carrier.

- [Narrator] Each carrier can hold up to 25 wafers

and there are about 4,000 of these

moving around the facility at one time.

- We are also the source of particles

when we go into the clean room.

- [Narrator] So never once during manufacturing

does the wafer come in contact with any of the workers.

- You will bring the wafers directly to the machine.

And in this foundry, basically 95%

of all processing jobs is fully automated.

- [Narrator] These raw wafers are cleaned

before starting a process that Rajkumar describes

as similar to making layered cake.

- The main function of diffusion cleaners

is basically to go layers of oxide or to dap the nitrite

onto the silicon.

- [Narrator] That creates a protective coating.

Next is a layer that makes the wafer light-sensitive.

So it's ready for one of the most important steps

called lithography.

- This is the most expensive module in any wafer foundry.

The number of lithography machine

will define how many wafers you can produce

in a month or a year.

- [Narrator] One lithography machine can cost anywhere

between 25 million to over 100 million dollars.

And that's because it's responsible

for adding layers of the circuitry.

Basically electronic components like transistors

and diodes that allow the chips eventually store data

or run apps.

- What I'm holding here is basically a (indistinct) design

of a circuitry.

- [Narrator] Inside this pink box is a photo mask,

which is like a glass stencil.

And clients send these directly to Global Foundries.

The lithography machine blasts UV light

through the photo mask and prints patterns

on the wafer over and over again.

The difference between an advanced chip for a 5G smartphone

versus one for your credit card comes down

to the type of wavelength that's used.

Shorter wavelengths mean you can edge finer features

and get more performance out of the chips.

Some of these transmitters are so small

that they're measured in nanometers

and compared to DNA strands.

Once the circuitry pattern is imprinted,

the wafer has to be charged.

- These machines use a lot of energy

to produce electrical charge

that allows the electrical to flow to the chip

and also creates the different type of function

for your electrical chips.

- Rajkumar says many of these steps are repeated

hundreds of times before the fabrication is complete.

And to get to this point,

these orders have to be made at least a year in advance.

- I have a demo wafers here.

- [Narrator] The finished wafers are tested

then finally sliced into individual chips.

- One is this small die wafers,

which is mainly useful bank cards or chips.

And then you have the other one

which is the bigger die wafers

which can go into other kinds of applications

like computer processing chips or electrical appliances.

- [Narrator] Global Foundry says it's fab at Singapore

typically makes about 600,000 wafers a year.

But with the recent surge in demand,

it's making around 120,000 more.

- This whole year is fully booked out.

We don't have any more space for new customers.

- [Narrator] Tan Yew Kong is the vice president

and general manager of Global Foundries Fab 7 in Singapore.

And he says, there's no quick solution.

- There's no space that you can house

another lithography tool or any other tools

that you'd like to buy.

It is a (indistinct) easily, a one year to 15 months

before you can see a tool that is coming into your factory.

- [Narrator] It's not just a backlog of equipment,

but Tan says expanding or building a fab

from the ground up would require deep investments.

More than the $1.4 billion that Global Foundries

has already committed to spend this year

on expanding its three fabs around the world.

- You easily need to spend 7 billion to 15 billion

depending on the size of the factory you want to build

and the technology that you're gonna develop

can easily take you decades to build the foundations.

- [Narrator] So to fill as many orders

as quickly as possible,

the company turned on idle machines

and opened this factory control tower.

Engineers here have a bird's-eye view of the entire fab.

And the green boxes show which machines are running

at max capacity.

Before this control tower

when there was a problem,

engineers had to sort through data

and piece together information themselves.

- Compared to today, just looking at the screen

you already know that this is a piece of machine.

You need to pay attention now.

- [Narrator] Tan says any time saved is precious

but to truly address the shortage,

the company is working more closely with its clients,

suppliers and the government.

- We're going to continue seeing more government support

because it is becoming such an important part

of the entire global supply chain.

- There's no reason why Americans should wait.

We're investing aggressively

in areas like semiconductors and batteries.

- [Narrator] The Biden administration

has proposed $50 billion

to boost America's chip production.

That's because while the US is one of the largest

semiconductor markets, the majority of the complex

and expensive manufacturing happens at a few companies

based in China and East Asia.

- That's because the world's biggest foundry in the world,

TSMC is located in Taiwan.

Samsung also has a sizeable foundry

as well as some Chinese players.

- [Narrator] This concentration of fabs means any disruption

to the supply chain, like a drought in Taiwan.

Or political tensions with China

can have big ripple effects.

Especially when global demand is expected to grow

by more than 12% this year.

- We have technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence.

And these types of advanced technology

means that more chips would be needed

to operate the devices that we use every day

- [Narrator] To meet that demand,

the Chip Industry Association

says it will require an investment of $3 trillion globally

over the next three decades.

So for us to buy new devices, Tan says his fab will work

around the clock

as it turns this challenge into a business opportunity.

- From the ambitions of wanting to grow the company,

this is definitely a positive point for us.

This over demand is gonna be around for a while.