Without these chips, we are in big trouble - and Britain has no strategy

The original deadline for his decision was last week, but - as- the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy asked for a 45-day deadline to make its decision.

Yet in fact that type of silicon chip - important, sexy and valuable as they are - is only one sub-sector of an extraordinarily wide range of chips.These chips that represent the brain of your smartphone or laptop are really just a dizzying number of switches used for computing tasks, with so many of these binary on-off switches that you can array them into something that can be programmed.

You might not be especially aware of the existence of these semiconductors, but they are quite literally everywhere.When you push your brake pedal in your car or wind down your electric window, what is happening in practice is one of these semiconductors being triggered and sending electrical currents down a wire.

Actually, within this sector, where chips are broadly speaking simpler but more robust and capable of dealing with high flows of power than their"brain" counterparts, Newport is a surprisingly big deal.This is what's known as a"ballroom" fab, in which the floor where the chips are made sits directly on top of a complicated basement level - the sub-fab - where pipe upon pipe of gases are fed up into the machinery etching patterns on to silicon.

These wafers are expensive, and even more expensive are the machines in which they sit and whizz around - a process which takes months - as the transistors are etched into them. In a typical car these days you might have hundreds of these power chips for everything from brake lights to wing mirrors, but only a few of the logic chips - those"brains" - to work the navigation and media console.- both the"brain" ones but also the power ones - has caused a major downturn in car manufacturing, not to mention other sectors.

And in recent years, Newport has been at the centre of a compound semiconductor cluster here in South Wales.There is also what is known as"silicon photonics", whereby you can use a combination of light and electrical signals to do new things, among them creating medical sensors.

I’m sure McCain can help!!

Maybe shouldn't have shut the NEC semi conductor factory in Livingston all those years ago eh!

Shouldn't have sold out manufacturing to China

This is why politics is such a serious business and needs grown up intellects to arrive at valid solutions

Fish is no good without the chips alright

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