SoCThe semiconductor: every modern machine begins here

Every solar charge controller Sudan imports. Every mobile phone in a displaced person’s hand in Port Sudan. Every agricultural sensor, every medical monitor, every radio relay on a Nile ferry — all of them run on chips fabricated in Taiwan, South Korea, China, or the United States. Sudan has no role in making any of them. The question this article asks is: should it, can it, and if so, where does it begin?

The answer is not simple. Semiconductor fabrication sits near the apex of industrial complexity — it is, by some measures, the most technically demanding manufacturing process humans have ever built. But complexity is not destiny. And the question is not whether Sudan builds a chip factory next year. It is whether Sudan understands the semiconductor value chain well enough to enter it at the right point, in the right sequence, and begin the long climb.

What the Semiconductor Value Chain Actually Is

Before assessing feasibility, it helps to understand what “semiconductor manufacturing” actually means — because it is not one thing. It is a chain with distinct segments, each with its own capital requirements, skill base, and barriers to entry.

Design sits at the top: engineers use specialised software (Electronic Design Automation, or EDA) to design the circuit that will go on a chip. Companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD design chips without owning a single factory. This segment is knowledge-intensive but not capital-intensive. The inputs are computers, software licenses, and engineers.

Wafer fabrication is what most people mean by “semiconductor manufacturing” — the physical process of printing billions of transistors onto silicon wafers using photolithography, etching, deposition, and hundreds of other chemical and physical processes. This is extraordinarily capital-intensive, technically demanding, and requires near-perfect environmental conditions: temperature-controlled cleanrooms, uninterrupted power, ultra-pure water by the millions of litres, and a supply chain of hundreds of exotic chemicals and precision instruments. TSMC in Taiwan runs this at scale. So does Samsung in South Korea and a handful of others.

Assembly, Testing and Packaging (ATP) comes after fabrication: wafers are cut into individual chips, each chip is tested, and the good ones are packaged into the black components you can see on a circuit board. ATP accounts for roughly 30–35% of the total value added in the semiconductor chain. It is significantly less capital-intensive than fabrication, more labour-intensive, and has historically been the entry point for developing-country participation — Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam all built semiconductor sectors this way.

These three segments have radically different cost and skills profiles. Any honest discussion of Sudan and semiconductors must specify which segment it is talking about.

The Honest Cost Assessment

Full wafer fabrication: A mature-node fab — one producing chips at 28nm or older process geometries, the kind that power automotive electronics, industrial controllers, IoT devices, and solar inverters — costs between $3 billion and $9 billion to build and equip. Leading-edge fabs (the sub-5nm nodes in smartphones and AI chips) cost $15–20 billion and rising. The equipment alone for a single extreme ultraviolet lithography machine costs upwards of $200 million; a leading-edge fab needs dozens of them. Beyond capital, the facility requires continuous, ultra-clean power — a single brownout can destroy an entire batch of wafers — and millions of litres of ultra-pure water daily. The workforce requirement includes hundreds of process engineers with PhD-level knowledge of materials science, chemistry, and physics, and thousands of technicians trained for years on specific equipment.

For Sudan — a country whose grid has been destroyed by war, whose engineering institutions need rebuilding, and which lacks the industrial base that normally precedes semiconductor manufacturing — full wafer fabrication is not a ten-year target. It is a thirty-to-fifty-year horizon, conditional on successfully completing the earlier stages of industrialisation first.

ATP (Assembly, Testing and Packaging): A viable ATP facility can be established for $50–500 million depending on scale and technology level. It requires a disciplined, trainable workforce, reliable power, and logistics connectivity — none of which are trivial in post-war Sudan, but all of which are on the agenda for reconstruction regardless. The World Economic Forum noted in 2025 that ATP represents Africa’s most realistic entry point into the semiconductor supply chain. Kenya has already established the continent’s first ATP facility through Amal Semiconductor. Nigeria is developing a strategy for the same.

Chip design: The capital cost is orders of magnitude lower — primarily computers, EDA software licenses ($50,000–$500,000 per seat annually for professional tools, though open-source alternatives exist for some segments), and engineering talent. A small chip design team of ten experienced engineers can produce commercially viable designs. The barrier here is almost entirely human capital: semiconductor design engineers with industry experience. Sudan has none trained domestically at present. But it has universities, a diaspora, and a global labour market.

Is This of Paramount Importance?

The honest answer is: eventually yes, immediately no — but the sequencing question must be asked precisely.

Semiconductors are not optional for a modern industrial economy. They are embedded in every productive system: the inverter in a solar panel, the sensor in an irrigation system, the controller in a textile machine, the processor in a hospital monitor. A country that cannot make chips is permanently dependent on countries that can, and permanently exposed to whatever restrictions, pricing, or supply disruptions those countries choose to impose. The chip shortages of 2020–2022 — which shut down car factories across the world — illustrated in concrete terms what semiconductor dependency costs.

But the historical record of industrialisation is clear on sequencing. South Korea, which today hosts Samsung Foundry, began its industrial development with textiles, then steel, then shipbuilding, then heavy chemicals, then electronics assembly, then consumer electronics, and only then semiconductors — a process spanning roughly thirty years of deliberate policy. Taiwan followed a similar trajectory. Neither country started where it ended up. Ha-Joon Chang’s point about kicking away the ladder applies in reverse too: you don’t skip rungs on the way up.

Sudan’s immediate industrial priorities — energy, transport, food processing, building materials, textiles — are not distractions from a semiconductor future. They are prerequisites for it. A country without reliable electricity cannot operate a cleanroom. A country without a trained engineering workforce cannot staff a design house. A country without basic manufacturing infrastructure cannot supply the logistics that semiconductor production requires.

The right framing is not “should Sudan pursue semiconductors?” but “what must Sudan build, and in what order, so that semiconductors become possible?”

What Skills Exist and What Must Be Built

Sudan has electrical engineering faculties at the University of Khartoum, Sudan University of Science and Technology, Omdurman Islamic University, and others. Before the 2023 war, these programmes graduated hundreds of engineers annually. Some of those graduates have since joined the diaspora in Gulf states, Europe, and North America — including, in some cases, in technology industries.

What Sudan does not have is semiconductor-specific training. The gap between a general electrical engineering degree and the specialised knowledge required for chip design (digital logic, RF design, analogue circuits, VLSI) or process engineering (materials science, cleanroom chemistry, thin film deposition) is substantial. It requires deliberate curriculum investment, industry partnerships, and in the short term, either diaspora return or international technical collaboration.

The more accessible near-term skill base is software engineering and embedded systems — engineers who write firmware for chips designed elsewhere. This segment of the value chain requires no capital equipment at all: a laptop, a compiler, and knowledge. Sudan has people who can do this today.

What Industries Semiconductor Capability Would Benefit

The downstream effects of domestic semiconductor capability — even at the design or ATP stage — are substantial:

Solar energy: Every charge controller, inverter, and battery management system in the distributed solar sector contains chips. Sudan’s solar programme, as it scales, will import millions of these components. Even modest domestic ATP or design capability could begin localising some of this value chain.

Agricultural technology: Soil sensors, weather stations, irrigation controllers, livestock tracking systems, grain drying monitors — precision agriculture runs on low-cost microcontrollers. Designs could be localised for Sudanese conditions and manufactured regionally.

Telecommunications: Sudan’s mobile network will need to be rebuilt. Every base station, every handset, every router contains chips. Component assembly and eventually design capability creates options for technology ownership rather than technology dependency.

Medical devices: Diagnostic equipment, patient monitors, blood pressure monitors — devices that are desperately needed in post-war Sudan and currently imported entirely. Basic electronic assembly is within reach on a five-to-ten year horizon.

Defence and civil infrastructure: This category is significant but politically complex. Many countries pursue semiconductor capability partly for defence sovereignty — the ability to produce electronics not subject to export controls. Sudan’s situation makes this relevant without making it the primary framing.

Compressing the Timeline – Without Waiting for Permission

The 30-50 year horizon applies to the organic, from-scratch, dependent-on-Western-goodwill path. There is a faster route, and it runs through Sudanese institutions rather than around them.

This matters directly. Western governments have demonstrated, repeatedly and explicitly, that technology access is a political weapon. US export controls froze Huawei out of advanced chips. SWIFT exclusions cut Sudan off from international banking. The implicit promise of the liberal international order – that trade and technology flow freely to all – has not applied to Sudan, and there is no reason to expect it will. Building a semiconductor strategy that depends on Western multinationals providing technology transfer, or Western-aligned multilateral institutions providing financing on neutral terms, is building on sand.

The alternative is not autarky. It is choosing your partners deliberately and building the domestic institutional base that makes external dependence optional rather than structural. South Korea and Taiwan did not develop semiconductor industries because Western governments wanted them to. They developed them because their states decided to, directed resources accordingly, and protected infant industries long enough for them to become competitive. The tools for that strategy are available to Sudan too.

What Sudanese institutions can do now, with immediate returns:

The open-source semiconductor route. This is genuinely new and genuinely transformative. The Google-sponsored SkyWater open process design kit – available free to anyone – allows chip designs to be submitted for actual fabrication without paying TSMC or signing any agreement with a US corporation. The OpenROAD and Magic EDA tools are open source. The RISC-V processor architecture is open source. A team of engineers at the University of Khartoum can today design a real chip, in open tools, and submit it for fabrication through an open programme. The chips come back. This costs almost nothing and requires no Western partner willing to cooperate.

University chip design labs. A semiconductor design lab requires a room, computers, and faculty who know the tools. The curriculum exists online. The tools are free or low-cost. Sudanese universities can establish this within a single academic year. Students who complete it become employable in chip design firms globally – generating export income and skills even before a domestic industry exists. Immediate payoff: a trained, globally-mobile engineering workforce.

Secondary school electronics pipelines. Teaching microcontroller programming and basic electronics at secondary school level costs almost nothing and produces students who arrive at university already capable. Sudan has technical secondary schools. Updating their curriculum to include embedded systems is a Ministry of Education decision, not a capital investment. Immediate payoff: every graduate who can programme a microcontroller is employable in the global gig economy writing firmware for foreign clients today.

Government procurement as demand. If the Sudanese government mandates that solar installations use locally-assembled charge controllers – even assembled from imported components – that procurement commitment creates the demand that makes a domestic assembly workshop viable. The cooperative or state enterprise that wins that contract learns by doing, accumulates skills, and can eventually move up the value chain. Immediate payoff: a workshop exists, employs people, and builds capability from day one.

Cooperative electronics assembly. Mondragon’s first enterprise was not the most sophisticated thing the Basque economy could imagine – it was a small cooperative making paraffin heaters. What mattered was cooperative ownership, reinvested surplus, a technical college feeding the pipeline, and a bank financing the next step. The equivalent for Sudan is a cooperative electronics assembly workshop: PCB assembly, solar component testing, simple device manufacturing. Low capital, real skills, real product, cooperative-owned so profits stay in the community and fund what comes next.

A state technology bank. South Korea had the Korea Development Bank. Taiwan had the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) – a state body that absorbed foreign technology, replicated it domestically, and spun out private companies. Sudan needs a domestic financing mechanism for technology investment: not a foreign aid window, but a state institution that can take the long view, tolerate the learning period before profitability, and direct capital to strategic sectors. This is a political and institutional decision that costs less to establish than a single solar farm.

South-South partnerships instead of Western dependency. China, India, Kenya, and Brazil all have semiconductor-related capabilities and far fewer political preconditions for cooperation than Western governments. China’s semiconductor expansion – driven precisely by the need to escape Western chip sanctions – has created a parallel supply chain that is increasingly accessible. Indian engineering universities train chip designers; partnerships with IIT programmes are achievable. Kenya’s Amal Semiconductor ATP facility is a regional model Sudan can learn from directly. None of these require Sudan to accept IMF conditionalities or navigate hostile export control regimes.

The Verdict

Sudan should not attempt to build a wafer fab in this decade, and should not depend on Western goodwill for any stage of the process. What it should do:

Now: Open-source chip design programmes at engineering universities. Updated secondary school electronics curricula. Cooperative electronics assembly workshops. Local-content mandates in government electronics procurement.

Within five years: A state technology financing institution. An embedded systems and firmware workforce developed into a formal export industry. ATP facility feasibility study with South-South technical partners.

Within fifteen years: A viable ATP facility. Chip design firms producing for regional markets. Net export of engineering talent and firmware services.

On the thirty-to-fifty year horizon: Domestic wafer fabrication, built on the foundations created by earlier stages – and owned by Sudanese institutions, not licensed from foreign corporations under conditions set in Washington or Brussels.

The semiconductor is not where Sudan starts. But the first steps are available today, cost almost nothing, and generate returns immediately. The question is only whether the decision gets made.

Further Reading – Kandaka Library

External Resources