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Around the world, lives changed almost overnight. Workplaces and schools closed their doors, aircraft were grounded, and people found themselves confined within their own homes.

But while the disruption caused by the coronavirus has pushed many of the world’s economies to the brink of recession, one often overlooked material has been instrumental in keeping the situation from being far worse.

Thanks to silicon-based semiconductors, the world has experienced Covid-19 as a very modern pandemic.

While the circuits printed onto wafers of silicon might be small, semiconductor chips have packed a big punch in our efforts to both fight Covid-19 and adapt to life with it. Their useful electrical properties make semiconductors essential to electronics manufacturing. Found inside objects ranging from ventilators to smartphones, they’re proving crucial to just about every aspect of life during the pandemic.

• Watch our film about how semiconductors are fighting Covid-19

Thanks to these wafers of silicon inside our technology, businesses have been able to move their operations online and allow staff to work remotely. Families have enjoyed video calls with loved ones living far away, and teachers have delivered lessons remotely.

Meanwhile scientists have shared research and data about the new virus over the internet, collaborating on an unprecedented scale against a global health threat. Genetic sequencing machines used to diagnose those infected by Covid-19 and ventilators given to the most seriously ill rely on the semiconductors inside them to work. Microchips inside every smartphone have also made it possible to track and trace people who have had contact with those who are infected.

According to Quartz Corp, whose high-quality quartz quarries produce much of the silicon used in the world’s digital devices, mining operations haven’t been disrupted by the pandemic. This applies to other mines as well. “Silicon mining operations have been largely unaffected by the pandemic,” says Ondrej Burkacky, who heads the semiconductors practice of consulting firm McKinsey. “Globally operations are quite stable.”

But other parts of the semiconductor industry have been rocked by Covid-19. The global nature of the supply chain meant that border closures, transport stoppages, and general uncertainty led to hitches in semiconductor production during the early days of the pandemic.

“Covid has exposed some vulnerabilities in that supply chain,” says Peter Benyon, the general manager of a GlobalFoundries facility in Saratoga, New York. The company buys high-purity silicon wafers, made from quartz sand, as the base material for chips. A fabrication facility – or “fab” as they are known in the industry – prints circuits onto silicon wafers to produce these chips. For specialised tools that come, for instance, from South Korea or Japan, “you can’t just turn around and buy it from somewhere else, in many cases”. And as making a single chip could involve 1,000 processing steps, with manufacturing tools running 24/7, every device needs to be operating smoothly.

Of the companies surveyed by the Semiconductor Industry Association in March, 83% reported disrupted operations, research or development. This was mainly due to governments mandating that facilities shut down (although some governments, such as in China and the US, deemed semiconductor industry workers essential). In some parts of Malaysia, for instance, the police prevented employees from entering facilities. The knock-on effects included shortages of semiconductor parts for medical ventilators.

For GlobalFoundries, one of its biggest production challenges related to a fab in Singapore. This particular plant employed many people who would typically cross over from Malaysia each day. When the Singaporean government closed the border, the factory team responded quickly. They rented about 100 hotel rooms for Malaysian workers willing to stay in Singapore and bought tablets for those on the Malaysian side who could work remotely.

For other fabs, the pandemic accelerated the move towards automating and digitising processes wherever possible. Benyon says that restrictions to international travel required some innovation around the advanced troubleshooting that would normally happen in person when a tool broke down or components malfunctioned. For instance, his fab started using augmented reality headsets to receive real-time fault-finding guidance from manufacturers.

Unlike many parts of the economy, some aspects of the semiconductor industry are thriving. McKinsey’s Burkacky anticipates that “in 2020, the semiconductor market as a whole is likely to grow by up to 5%”. The favourable short-term prospects reflect how the pandemic has accelerated many digitally based solutions to enable people to work remotely, learn online and consult with doctors via screen. All of these would not be possible without semiconductors.

“We really saw a significant increase in our demand as we got into the Covid situation,” says Benyon. GlobalFoundries’ factories were already at high production output pre-pandemic, but “the demand now has driven us to full capacity”, says Benyon.

It also helped that semiconductor manufacturing plants were already extremely hygienic, even before the pandemic made germophobes of us all. “In many ways we had an advantage there,” Benyon says. A fab is “a little bit like a hospital operating theatre in terms of cleanliness”. To avoid contamination, workers enter and exit clean rooms through airlocks, in head-to-toe protective clothing. In these tightly controlled conditions, the largest stray particles in clean rooms tend to be even tinier than coronavirus particles.

As well, Benyon, who previously managed a fab in Singapore, had experience of crisis management following the Sars outbreak of 2003. “We built a playbook based off of this experience and kind of expanded that out company-wide. And that made us pretty well prepared.” The playbook included steps that are familiar across many industries now, but were more novel in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic: suspending business travel, quarantining people who had visited Covid-19 hotspots, and reducing the number of people onsite through split shifts, for example. (Benyon isn’t one of those people who has shifted his work offsite. “I haven’t had a day off in seven months,” he says ruefully.)

Another person who’s become busier during the pandemic is poultry farmer Beatrice Obuong. The 33-year-old entrepreneur lives with her husband and three children – and tends to her 80-odd chickens – in Kisumu, Kenya.

Like many other organisations, the pandemic has pushed Obuong’s business toward digitisation. Before the pandemic she delivered her chickens in bulk to schools and hotels, which paid her afterward. Sometimes there were delays in payment, affecting her ability to plan and grow her business.

With the arrival of coronavirus in Kenya, lockdown-related disruptions meant that she could no longer rely on these big organisational customers.

So Obuong had to pivot. She turned to Facebook to advertise her chickens, and has gained a steady stream of individual customers who collect directly from her farm. It has meant her transport costs have dropped, while her cash flow has become more reliable. With the support of the NGO Practical Action, she’s planning to expand, with an incubator and hatchery that will allow her to sell chicks as young as a day old.

Her internet use has shifted as “since the pandemic started, I entirely depend on social media to market my business”, Obuong says. Her experiences demonstrate the transformative potential of digital access.

Of course, not all jobs can be done online, and the internet is still not accessible for many people – an estimated 3.6 billion people around the world are still not able to get online.

Indeed, the pandemic has “emphasised the problem of connectivity”, notes Anri van der Spuy, of the think tank Research ICT Africa. From children who don’t have the devices needed for remote lessons, to elderly people who don’t know how to use their devices to access information online, the pandemic has exacerbated and drawn attention to digital inequality.

She cautions using short-term technological solutions as a sticking-plaster against larger social issues, such as offline gender inequality – 52% of the world’s women are not able to access the internet compared to 42% of men. There are also major infrastructural barriers that hinder continued connectivity, such as South Africa’s limited number of mobile network operators, which is driving up prices for data.

For more sustainable digital integration, she argues, attention needs to be paid to the potential risks posed by connectivity, from cybersecurity breaches to disinformation. And as important as digital access is, it’s also “really important…to make sure that there isn’t only a digital option – always have an offline option”, says van der Spuy.

In the Covid era, for example, those without debit or credit cards might struggle to make purchases from businesses that have gone cashless for hygiene reasons. And mutual aid groups that sprang up in the early days of lockdown often initially relied on receiving and making offers of support through social media. As it became clear that many needy people weren’t big internet users, it was necessary to adopt low-tech alternatives like printing and distributing flyers.

It is clear more needs to be done to ensure everyone can benefit from the advantages that semiconductors provide in our modern, fast-moving world. But it is also easy to take them for granted. Without the microchips, forged from the silicon mined from quartz, the pandemic could have been very different.

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The world’s trading routes have seen a year like no other in 2020. Many industries, makers and markets have responded to the coronavirus pandemic with ingenuity. Made on Earth: Road to Recovery explores how the trades in eight everyday products are adapting – from bicycles to whisky, spices to semiconductors – and how resilience and innovation are redefining the way the world trades.