The 1986 American-Japanese semiconductor trade pact was designed to help U.S. chip manufacturers compete with Japanese companies.
[5] This was due to the strong push of mobile phone companies to introduce and establish CDMA in both the United States and India.
[citation needed] From early 2020, the effects of and the mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions in supply chains and logistics.
This was coupled with a 13% increase in global demand for PCs owing to some countries' shift to a stay-at-home economy,[6] and impacted the availability of key chips necessary for the manufacturing of electronics.
[9] As an example of the effects, at the end of Q1 2021, used car prices in some countries were increasing due to the demand from both economic recovery, as well as the chip shortage.
The droughts affected the production due to the lack of available ultrapure water that is needed to clean the factories and wafers.
[11][12] Other factors cited as contributing to the shortage are the increased popularity of cryptocurrency[13] and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Older chips made on "mature node" equipment can easily go into shortage if demand spikes, because the production lines have already been fully depreciated and optimized.
[17] The 1988 chip famine caused the delay of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link due to a lack of static random-access memory (SRAM).
[20] Lack of chips from the COVID supply disruption, caused researchers to develop solderless 3-D printable adapters for converting small outline integrated circuit (SOIC) components to be used in dual in-line package (DIP) package circuits (i.e., breadboards, protoboards, etc.).