Integrated Circuits (or ICs) are the root of most of the technology we rely on in our daily lives, from mobile phones to internet data center servers to communication satellites in orbit. For commercial and industrial businesses, ICs provide the computational power found in all automated equipment and software systems as well. Manufacturing ICs falls within the domain of the semiconductor industry, where all circuit boards, processing chips, and transistor arrays are produced.
As the poetic analogy goes, if humans live one breath at a time, international trade lives one cargo ship at a time. Each year, an estimated 11 billion tons of goods make their way over open ocean, dutifully transported by over 100,000 active seafaring freight vessels between ports across the world.
