Chip War

As often happens I'll get an email out of the blue: your reserved library book is available - often a book I barely remember reserving :)  This time it is Chip War by Chris Miller.

  An interesting book although since it's from 2022 in some ways (the recent AI craze) it's aged out. (Actually the AI boom is addressed in this edition with an extensive appendix).   Here are a few observations on the book:

The Transistor Girls by Paul Daniels => As my Grandmother might have commented:  "spicy"

https://archive.org/details/bwb_P9-EJQ-315/page/146/mode/2up

GCA => I confess I'd never heard of this company, they invented the stepper lithography at the suggestion of Morris Chang (founder of TSMC) ?  But they dumped Nikon as the supplier of their optics so Nikon went into the stepper business, listened to customers and did better than GCA.

Micron => Everyone has heard of Micron in Idaho but I didn't know of their relentless focus on cost and process improvement rather than on bleeding edge technology.  And I didn't know that a "potato king" literally financed Micron initially !

Morris Chang => if someone in the US had offered him the CEO job of a large semi company with carte blanche to do as he pleased those advanced chips would be made here in the US instead of in Taiwan - the foundry concept was genius at work because at some point what does Intel do with more transistors other than add cache memory to a processor ?  Foundry lets the customer decide how to employ those transistors while the foundry concentrates on refining the process in a continuous cycle.

NSA => I didn't know that there was any project that was too costly for the NSA until I read this:

Saildrone => never heard of this marine drone before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saildrone_(company)

Intel could have been a contender => Intel (under CEO Otellini) turned down the chance to build the Iphone processors - Intel suffered the curse of a very profitable product, the x86 processor - nothing else would match x86.  Now Apple has the same dilemma, what can replace the profitability of an Iphone ?

EUV => developing EUV Extreme Ultra Violet light for use in fabricating the most advanced chips is worthy of a whole book itself.  The method used is to shoot laser beams at small blobs of tin to excite the tin to the point that the short wavelength of light is emitted, amazing.

Huawei => although there was a lot of hysteria about Chinese government involvement I think the reality here is that Huawei was playing the globalization game and winning, they went from importing telecom gear to designing and building their own 5G infrastructure equipment in a very short time by using US software and TSMC as a foundry.  They got slapped down.  Also banning phones/tablets/computers from Huawei may also be a way of propping up the likes of Apple (who are very good boys => they give people gold AND they don't ask for tariff tax refunds).  Huawei does some impressive work:

https://x.com/CinematicEye_/status/2059199629779222938

Taiwan =>  This is the big question for the near future - I'm sure the various AIs get asked about that island a lot.  How to defend Taiwan from China ?  How does the US respond to a Chinese attack ?  I think the thing that Mainland China doesn't understand is that entities like TSMC don't really work in repressive states - there has to be freedom for them to work - customers need to have trust in TSMC not to mess with their IP - does anyone trust Mainland China ?  That's like asking if anyone trusts President Trump.  Let's hope that the mainland doesn't decide to kill the golden goose by invading Taiwan.

This is a very readable book, not too heavy on tech details  - concentrating more on the people involved.  I just hope that people realize that the freedom, particularly academic freedom, that spawned these chips is now under assault by enemies both foreign and domestic.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm