It is not just cellular infrastructure that is suffering from constriction in the supply chain but also the semiconductor industry underpinning it, especially among the foundries where the integrated circuits are manufactured. This has reared its head recently in the light of global shortages among both leading edge and standard chips that are now afflicting a wide range of industrial sectors, including telecoms. The crisis has been acknowledged by leading ICT manufacturers including IBM and Dell, as well as by Intel, which is still by some distance the world’s biggest dedicated semiconductor company by revenue at around $77bn a year. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest foundry, echoed these sentiments, with the consensus being that supplies would not catch up with…