The semiconductors that underpin telecoms infrastructure are sometimes forgotten in discussion about open and multivendor networks, but they are a crucial aspect. In traditional networks, each vendor had its own proprietary chips to power and differentiate their equipment, leading to one of the barriers to interoperability and open ecosystems. That situation has persisted in macro base stations until the advent of Open RAN, while in other network domains there has been a gradual shift from proprietary to merchant chips, driving telecoms success for firms like Broadcom. But this is not a simple picture. Merchant chips do not necessarily lead to openness. As the history of the PC and server sectors demonstrate, if one company (in that case Intel) gains a…