Faculty Sponsor

Charles Herrick

Final Abstract for URS Program

Microchips have become a crucial influence on a country’s military and commercial sectors; a nation’s capacity to produce large volumes of quality microchips indicates its importance on the world stage. Recently, both the United States and China have promoted many domestic and foreign industrial policies that address each country’s interests in the production and sophistication of its microchips, establishing for themselves a dominant position in the global microchip market. Both countries’ policies aim to simultaneously control/influence microchip production abroad and also stimulate development and production domestically. I have collected commercial, economic, and government budget data provided by various United States federal and private commercial entities that directly refer to these policies. These data, and the policies they relate to, mean that recent US government attention toward Chinese technological advancement, as well as American overreliance upon Taiwan for microchip production, demands concern. Consequently, the US has enacted industrial policies that incentivize scaling up of domestic microchip fabrication facilities, to increase their output and quality, and to create jobs for microchip-specialized workers. These moves are massive financial investments, illustrating the importance of microchips to Chinese and US economic interests. However, such policies, which may appear benign to a domestic audience, are clearly adversarial. Both countries promote these policies as inwardly focused, but they are actually aggressive attempts to prevent the other country from controlling the advanced microchip market. Should tensions between the US and China rise, the many countries that maintain trade with either nation would be ensnared in the fallout.

Presentation Type

Visual Presentation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

April 2023

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