The journey of a chip starts with ordinary quartz-rich sand that contains silicon dioxide. It's heated and refined into pure ...

U.S.-based chipmakers hardly use tools made in China, but they certainly use lithography, etching, and deposition equipment produced in the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Taiwan, the center of the global supply chain for computer chips, woke up on Thursday to the news that President Trump had put new 32 percent tariffs on the island’s exports to the United States.