Batik, chips and tech in the fabric of society

Indonesia has ambitious plans to upgrade its digital infrastructure and capabilities in line with the Indonesia 4.0 industrial roadmap.

FLYING into Jakarta this week reminds me of the exotic blend between the ancient and the new that is Indonesia.

Java is famous for its beautiful batik textiles that are cotton fabric printed with superb designs from many cultures, from Indian patola patterns, native Javanese bold block icons to Peranakan Chinese butterfly and bird prints.

This combination of old and new is reflected in the incoming presidential team comprising 72-year-old former General Prabowo Subianto as Indonesia president-elect and 36-year-old vice-president elect Gibran Raka Rakabuming, son of incumbent president Jokowi.

Their election manifesto involved raising the growth rate of Indonesia to 8% per annum from the current 5% level, eradicating extreme poverty in two years, and continuing the shift of the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara on the island of Borneo.

This is a country that aims to use technology and economy to move to the 21st Century. But this is built on a history of diverse culture and superb craftsmanship tradition.

As the world’s fourth-largest country by population, president Jokowi has already set the ambition of becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045 well into advanced income status by then.

The nation has ambitious plans to upgrade its digital infrastructure and capabilities in line with the Indonesia 4.0 industrial roadmap.

According to the Global Innovation Index 2023, Indonesia ranked 61st among 132 countries ranked, demonstrating continuous improvement from 80th place in 2020.

Sooner or later, Indonesia will move into the semiconductor chip design or assembly field as silicon chips are critical foundations of a digital economy.

Reading Chris Miller’s book “Chip War” this week to understand how semiconductor chips are changing our future, it struck me how their complex design and manufacturing process share patterns of similarity to the printing and production of indigenous textiles like the famous batik and ikat (tie and dye) in Indonesia and East and South Asia generally.

Silicon chips are basically integrated circuits that connect nodes together where electricity current switches, enabling binary digital information to be processed.

When Silicon Valley pioneers like Fairchild Semiconductors, Intel and Texas Instruments improved on “wired transistors” in the 1960s, they avoided the hugely inefficient task of literally wiring (or soldering) different transistors together by putting different components on a single block of germanium.

By covering the block with black wax, and then removing the wax, those parts not covered by wax could interact with the covered parts to generate positive/negative signals that form the basics of binary computing.

The next innovation came when wax was replaced by silicon dioxide on top of a slab of silicon and then “etching” or later printing the circuit by depositing lines of metal between different transistors within a single slab (today called the wafer because it involves layers of silicon connected horizontally and vertically).

The whole process of miniaturisation and reliability was improved when lithographic printing was invented, essentially packing more and more transistors onto a single circuit.

Throughout East and South/South-East Asia, batik and ikat textiles are produced by weaving together horizontal and vertical lines of cotton or silk thread in a loom, and then dying the threads with different colours.

In the batik process, the cloth is covered with wax, and the pattern printed through a hot copper design block that melts the wax beneath.

When the cloth is then put into a vat of dye, those parts where the wax has melted would have the dye colour and those covered would retain its original colour.

The process is manually repeated with different designs and dyes until the final product is both intricate and beautiful.

In simple terms, silicon circuits have to be “masked” before they are “printed”, using the most sophisticated lithographic machines made by the Dutch company ASML.

Indeed, any tourist who buys a cheap ikat textile from Sumba island, South of Bali, would recognise that rough and crude tie and dye techniques end up with blurred “pixel” like images.

The finest cloth, meanwhile, has 4K like clarity because the finer the threads and designs, the sharper the final image would be.

One cannot help making the connection between the best chip manufacturers like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China which all have long traditions of wax tie and dye textiles that demanded great attention to detail and hand-skills.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.