With COVID-19 shaking the global supply chain like an angry toddler with a box of jelly beans, the average person had to take a crash course in the semiconductor industry. And many of them didn’t like what they learned. Want a new car? Tough luck, not enough chips. A new gaming system? Same. But you are not the average person, dear reader. So, in addition to learning why there was a chip shortage in the first place, you also discovered that you can—with considerable effort—fit more than 2 trillion transistors on a single chip. You also found that the future of Moore’s Law depends as much on where you put the wires as how small you make the transistors, among many other things.
So to recap the semiconductor stories you read most this year, we’ve put together this set of highlights: