Puliyabaazi

The semiconductor microchip is perhaps the greatest modern-day innovation breakthrough. It made radios, TVs, computers, and phones happen. Today, a processor microchip has billions of components and is created using a complex supply chain involving thousands of specialised companies cutting across the globe. This trade network with nodes spread all across the world worked seamlessly at most times. Until now that is. Within the last two years, the technological domain has become one of the key battlegrounds of the ongoing geopolitical tussle between the US and China. The US has chosen to use the choke points in the semiconductor manufacturing process to constrain China’s technological growth. Given that this conflict is strategic and not economic, semiconpolitics is here to stay. So in this episode, we deep-dive into the geopolitics of semiconductors. Our guest is Anup Rajput, an engineer par excellence who has worked in the semiconductor industry and currently heads engineering functions at an AI start-up, In