"Chip War"

[fiefoe]

Chris Miller‘s presentation is quite clear, if a bit toos staid given the subject's potential.

• A corporate giant faced technological asphyxiation. Huawei discovered that, like all other Chinese companies, it was fatally dependent on foreigners to make the chips upon which all modern electronics depend... China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil.
• In 2020, as the world lurched between lockdowns driven by a virus whose diameter measured around one hundred nanometers—billionths of a meter—TSMC’s most advanced facility, Fab 18, was carving microscopic mazes of tiny transistors, etching shapes smaller than half the size of a coronavirus, a hundredth the size of a mitochondria... It was only sixty years ago that the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip wasn’t 11.8 billion, but 4.
• A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, UK-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit, and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese, and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make.
• There’s no better illustration of this than the individual who founded TSMC, a company that until 2020 counted America’s Apple and China’s Huawei as its two biggest customers. Morris Chang was born in mainland China; grew up in World War II−era Hong Kong; was educated at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford; helped build America’s early chip industry while working for Texas Instruments in Dallas; held a top secret U.S. security clearance to develop electronics for the American military; and made Taiwan the epicenter of world semiconductor manufacturing.

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• However, mastering the flow of electrons across semiconductor materials like silicon or germanium was a distant dream so long as their electrical properties remained mysterious and unexplained. <> In 1945, Shockley first theorized what he called a “solid state valve,”... He hypothesized that placing a piece of semiconductor material like silicon in the presence of an electric field could attract “free electrons” stored inside to cluster near the edge of the semiconductor. If enough electrons were attracted by the electric field, the edge of the semiconductor would be transformed into a conductive material, like a metal
• saw this device—soon christened a “transistor”—as useful primarily for its ability to amplify signals that transmitted phone calls across its vast network. Because transistors could amplify currents, it was soon realized, they would be useful in devices such as hearing aids and radios, replacing less reliable vacuum tubes,.. By January 1948, he’d conceptualized a new type of transistor, made up of three chunks of semiconductor material. The outer two chunks would have a surplus of electrons; the piece sandwiched between them would have a deficit. If a tiny current was applied to the middle layer in the sandwich, it set a much larger current flowing across the entire device.
• Rather than use a separate piece of silicon or germanium to build each transistor, he thought of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor material... Kilby’s idea was revolutionary. Multiple transistors could be built into a single slab of silicon or germanium. Kilby called his invention an “integrated circuit,” but it became known colloquially as a “chip,”
• Noyce’s colleague Jean Hoerni, a Swiss physicist and avid mountaineer, realized the mesas weren’t necessary if the entire transistor could be built into, rather than on top of, the germanium. He devised a method of fabricating all the parts of a transistor by depositing a layer of protective silicon dioxide on top of a slab of silicon, then etching holes where needed and depositing additional materials. This method of depositing protective layers avoided exposing materials to air and impurities that could cause defects.
• It seemed far easier to miniaturize Fairchild’s “planar” design than standard mesa transistors. Smaller circuits, meanwhile, would require less electricity to work. Noyce and Moore began to realize that miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination: smaller transistors and reduced power consumption would create new use cases for their integrated circuits.
• Lathrop and his assistant, chemist James Nall, had an idea: a microscope lens could take something small and make it look bigger. If they turned the microscope upside down, its lens would take something big and make it look smaller. Could they use a lens to take a big pattern and “print” it onto germanium, thereby making miniature mesas on their blocks of germanium?
• (Morris) After a year spent studying Shakespeare, Chang began to worry about his career prospects. “There were Chinese-American laundry people, there were Chinese-American restaurant people,” he recalled. “The only really serious… middle class profession that a Chinese American could pursue in the early fifties was technical.”
• But he always envisioned an even larger civilian market for his chips, though in the early 1960s no such market existed. He would have to create it, which meant keeping the military at arm’s length so that he—not the Pentagon—set Fairchild’s R&D priorities. Noyce
• By 1968, the computer industry was buying as many chips as the military. Fairchild chips served 80 percent of this computer market. Bob Noyce’s price cuts had paid off, opening a new market for civilian computers that would drive chip sales for decades to come. Moore later argued that Noyce’s price cuts were as big an innovation as the technology inside Fairchild’s integrated circuits.
• A CIA report in 1959 found that America was only two to four years ahead of the Soviets in quality and quantity of transistors produced. At least several of the early Soviet exchange students were KGB agents
• Shokin’s “copy it” strategy was fundamentally flawed, however. Copying worked in building nuclear weapons, because the U.S. and the USSR built only tens of thousands of nukes over the entire Cold War. In the U.S., however, TI and Fairchild were already learning how to mass-produce chips. The key to scaling production was reliability, a challenge that American chipmakers like Morris Chang and Andy Grove fixated on during the 1960s.
• Young Soviet students didn’t pursue electrical engineering degrees, wanting to be like Osokin, because no one knew that he existed. Career advancement required becoming a better bureaucrat, not devising new products or identifying new markets. Civilian products were always an afterthought amid an overwhelming focus on military production. <> Meanwhile, the “copy it” mentality meant, bizarrely, that the pathways of innovation in Soviet semiconductors were set by the United States.
• U.S. strategy required letting Japan acquire advanced technology and build cutting-edge businesses. “A people with their history won’t be content to make transistor radios,”... Morita visited the hotel clandestinely and proposed a joint venture: TI would produce chips in Japan, and Sony would manage the bureaucrats.
• Chip firms hired women because they could be paid lower wages and were less likely than men to demand better working conditions. Production managers also believed women’s smaller hands made them better at assembling and testing finished semiconductors. In the 1960s,
• Bob Noyce had made a personal investment in a radio assembly factory in Hong Kong, the British colony just across the border from Mao Zedong’s Communist China. Wages were a tenth of the American average—around 25 cents an hour... In the mid-1960s, Taiwanese workers made 19 cents an hour, Malaysians 15 cents, Singaporeans 11 cents, and South Koreans only a dime... Lee Kuan Yew, had “pretty much outlawed” unions, as one Fairchild veteran remembered... The semiconductor industry was globalizing decades before anyone had heard of the word, laying the grounds for the Asia-centric supply chains we know today... Sporck noted. “We never had any union problems in the Orient.”
• The Sparrow III anti-aircraft missiles that U.S. fighters used in the skies over Vietnam relied on vacuum tubes that were hand-soldered. The humid climate of Southeast Asia, the force of takeoff and landings, and the rough-and-tumble of fighter combat caused regular failures.
• Finally, he installed a simple laser-guidance system that would control the wings. A small silicon wafer was divided into four quadrants and placed behind a lens. The laser reflecting off the target would shine through the lens onto the silicon. If the bomb veered off course, one quadrant would receive more of the laser’s energy than the others, and circuitry would move the wings to reorient the bomb’s trajectory so that the laser was shining straight through the lens.
• In the end, the guerilla war in Vietnam’s countryside wasn’t a fight that aerial bombing could win... Outside a small number of military theorists and electrical engineers, therefore, hardly anyone realized Vietnam had been a successful testing ground for weapons that married microelectronics and explosives in ways that would revolutionize warfare and transform American military power.
• By the end of the 1970s, American semiconductor firms employed tens of thousands of workers internationally, mostly in Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. A new international alliance emerged between Texan and Californian chipmakers, Asian autocrats, and the often ethnic-Chinese workers who staffed many of Asia’s semiconductor assembly facilities.
• Capacitors leak over time, so Dennard envisioned repeatedly charging the capacitor via the transistor. The chip would be called a dynamic (due to the repeated charging) random access memory, or DRAM. These chips form the core of computer memory up to the present day.
• Hoff realized computers face a tradeoff between customized logic circuits and customized software. Because chipmaking was a custom business, delivering specialized circuits for each device, customers didn’t think hard about software. However, Intel’s progress with memory chips—and the prospect they would become exponentially more powerful over time—meant computers would soon have the memory capacity needed to handle complex software. Hoff bet it would soon be cheaper to design a standardized logic chip that, coupled with a powerful memory chip programmed with different types of software, could compute many different things.
• In the early 1960s, it had been possible to claim the Pentagon had created Silicon Valley. In the decade since, the tables had turned. The U.S. military lost the war in Vietnam, but the chip industry won the peace that followed, binding the rest of Asia, from Singapore to Taiwan to Japan, more closely to the U.S. via rapidly expanding investment links and supply chains.
• They joked that Japan was the country of “click, click”—the sound made by cameras that Japanese engineers brought to chip conferences to better copy the ideas.
• A next-generation chip emerged roughly once every two years, requiring new facilities and new machinery. In the 1980s, U.S. interest rates reached 21.5 percent as the Federal Reserve sought to fight inflation. <> By contrast, Japanese DRAM firms got access to far cheaper capital. Chipmakers like Hitachi and Mitsubishi were part of vast conglomerates with close links to banks that provided large, long-term loans... In 1985, Japanese firms spent 46 percent of the world’s capital expenditure on semiconductors, compared to America’s 35 percent. By 1990, the figures were even more lopsided,
• “He must have had about ten meals a day while he was staying here,” Peterson recounted. <> Morita at first found the power and wealth represented by his American friends seductive. As America lurched from crisis to crisis, however, the aura around men like Henry Kissinger and Pete Peterson began to wane.
• Morita’s willingness to coauthor a book with someone like Ishihara shocked many Americans, showing that a threatening nationalism still lurked within the capitalist class that Washington had cultivated. The U.S. strategy since 1945 had been to bind Japan to the U.S. via exchanges of trade and technology. Akio Morita was arguably the greatest beneficiary of America’s tech transfers and its market openness. If even he was questioning America’s leading role, Washington needed to rethink its game plan. <> What made The Japan That Can Say No truly frightening to Washington was not only that it articulated a zero-sum Japanese nationalism, but that Ishihara had identified a way to coerce America.
• Micron made “the best damn widgets in the whole world,” Jack Simplot used to say. The Idaho billionaire didn’t know much about the physics of how his company’s main product, DRAM chips, actually worked... As America’s chip industry struggled to adjust to Japan’s challenge, cowboy entrepreneurs like him played a fundamental role in reversing what Bob Noyce had called a “death spiral” and executing a surprise turnaround... Jack Simplot was the least likely candidate. He’d made his first fortune in potatoes, pioneering the use of machines to sort potatoes, dehydrate them, and freeze them for use in french fries. This wasn’t Silicon Valley−style innovation, but it earned him a massive contract to sell spuds to McDonald’s.
• Simplot, who was as close to the opposite of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist as you could get. He’d later preside over impromptu Micron board meetings each Monday at 5:45 a.m. at Elmer’s, a local greasy spoon... Simplot instinctively understood that Ward and Joe Parkinson were entering the memory market at exactly the right time. A potato farmer like him saw clearly that Japanese competition had turned DRAM chips into a commodity market. He’d been through enough harvests to know that the best time to buy a commodity business was when prices were depressed and everyone else was in liquidation.
• Micron decided to challenge the Japanese DRAM makers at their own game, but to do so by aggressively cutting costs. Soon the company realized that tariffs might help, and reversed course, leading the charge for tariffs on imported Japanese DRAM chips.
• A key part of Silicon Valley’s strategy to outmaneuver the Japanese was to find cheaper sources of supply in Asia. Lee decided this was a role Samsung could easily play... Seven years after Lee founded Samsung, it could have been crushed in 1945, following Japan’s defeat by the United States. Yet Lee deftly pivoted, trading political patrons as smoothly as he hawked dried fish. He forged ties with the Americans who occupied the southern half of Korea after the war and fended off South Korean politicians who wanted to break up big business groups like his.
• Most of Silicon Valley was happy to work with Korean companies, undercutting Japanese competitors and helping make South Korea one of the world’s leading centers of memory chipmaking. The logic was simple, as Jerry Sanders explained: “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
• (Lynn) Conway was a brilliant computer scientist, but anyone who spoke with her discovered a mind that glistened with insights from diverse fields, astronomy to anthropology to historical philosophy. She had arrived at Xerox in 1973 in “stealth mode,” she explained, following being fired from IBM in 1968 after undergoing a gender transition. She was shocked to find that the Valley’s chipmakers were more like artists than engineers... Conway and Mead eventually drew up a set of mathematical “design rules,” paving the way for computer programs to automate chip design... Mead liked to think of himself as Johannes Gutenberg, whose mechanization of book production had let writers focus on writing and printers on printing.
• Chips, Jacobs realized, were improving so rapidly that they’d soon be able to encode orders of magnitude more data in the same spectrum space... Jacobs, Viterbi, and several colleagues set up a wireless communications business called Qualcomm—quality communications
• One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”
• A second issue was overreliance on military customers... Civilian semiconductor markets helped fund the specialization of the semiconductor supply chain, creating companies with expertise in everything from ultra-pure silicon wafers to the advanced optics in lithography equipment. The Soviet Union barely had a consumer market, so it produced only a fraction of the chips built in the West.. A final challenge was that the Soviets lacked an international supply chain.
• CNN broadcast videos of hundreds of bombs and missiles striking Iraqi tanks. Warfare looked like a video game. But watching from Texas, Weldon Word knew this futuristic technology actually dated to the Vietnam War.
• CEOs of Japan’s memory chip producers couldn’t bring themselves to stop building new chip fabs, even if they weren’t profitable. “If you start worrying” about overinvestment, one Hitachi executive admitted, “you can’t sleep at night.” So long as banks kept lending, it was easier for CEOs to keep spending than to admit they had no path to profitability. America’s arm’s-length capital markets hadn’t felt like an advantage in the 1980s, but the risk of losing financing helped keep American firms on their toes.
• At Toshiba, a DRAM giant, a mid-ranking factory manager named Fujio Masuoka developed a new type of memory chip in 1981 that, unlike DRAM, could continue “remembering” data even after it was powered off. Toshiba ignored this discovery, so it was Intel that brought this new type of memory chip, commonly called “flash” or NAND, to market. <> The biggest error that Japan’s chip firms made, however, was to miss the rise of PCs. None of the Japanese chip giants could replicate Intel’s pivot to microprocessors or its mastery of the PC ecosystem.
• Morita’s coauthor, Ishihara, kept insisting that Japan needed to assert itself on the world stage. Like a broken record, he published The Asia That Can Say No in 1994 followed by The Japan That Can Say No Again several years later.
• “What generally happened was that one of the ministers in the government would call a businessman in Taiwan,” Chang explained, “to get him to invest.” The government asked several of the island’s wealthiest families, who owned firms that specialized in plastics, textiles, and chemicals, to put up the money.
• The founding of TSMC gave all chip designers a reliable partner. Chang promised never to design chips, only to build them. TSMC didn’t compete with its customers; it succeeded if they did.
• A study in 1979 found that China had hardly any commercially viable semiconductor production and only fifteen hundred computers in the entire country.
• John Carruthers at Intel: Lithography companies were rolling out tools using deep ultraviolet light, with wavelengths of 248 or 193 nanometers, invisible to the human eye. But it wouldn’t be long before chipmakers would be asking for even more lithographic precision. He wanted to target “extreme ultraviolet” (EUV) light, with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers.
• By the mid-2000s, just as cloud computing was emerging, Intel had won a near monopoly over data center chips, competing only with AMD. Today, nearly every major data center uses x86 chips from either Intel or AMD. The cloud can’t function without their processors.
• However, Arm failed to win market share in PCs in the 1990s and 2000s, because Intel’s partnership with Microsoft’s Windows operating system was simply too strong to challenge. However, Arm’s simplified, energy-efficient architecture quickly became popular in small, portable devices that had to economize on battery use.
• But few of these new products caught on, less for technical reasons than because they were all far less profitable than Intel’s core business of building chips for PCs. They never attracted support from inside Intel... the status quo was simply too profitable. If Intel did nothing at all, it would still own two of the world’s most valuable castles—PC and server chips—surrounded by a deep x86 moat... A fixation on hitting short-term margin targets began to replace long-term technology leadership. The shift in power from engineers to managers accelerated this process.
• By the 2000s, it was common to split the semiconductor industry into three categories. “Logic” refers to the processors that run smartphones, computers, and servers. “Memory” refers to DRAM, which provides the short-term memory computers need to operate, and flash, also called NAND, which remembers data over time....  The third category... Clever design matters more than shrinking transistors. Today around three-quarters of this category of chips are produced on processors at or larger than 180 nanometers, a manufacturing technology that was pioneered in the late 1990s. As a result, the economics of this segment are different from logic and memory chips that must relentlessly shrink transistors to remain on the cutting edge. Fabs for these types of chips generally don’t need to race toward the smallest transistors every couple of years, so they’re substantially cheaper, on average requiring a quarter the capital investment of an advanced fab for logic or memory chips.
• His argument in favor of keeping AMD’s manufacturing in-house relied on macho-man posturing that was quickly going out of date. When he heard a quip from a journalist in the 1990s that “real men have fabs,” he adopted the phrase as his own. “Now hear me and hear me well,” Sanders declared at one industry conference. “Real men have fabs.”
• There was a lot more competition in the market for chips that rendered images on screens. The emergence of semiconductor foundries, and the driving down of startup costs, meant that it wasn’t only Silicon Valley aristocracy that could compete to build the best graphics processors. The company that eventually came to dominate the market for graphics chips, Nvidia,... Nvidia’s GPUs can render images quickly because, unlike Intel’s microprocessors or other general-purpose CPUs, they’re structured to conduct lots of simple calculations—like shading pixels—simultaneously.
• For each generation of cell phone technology after 2G, Qualcomm contributed key ideas about how to transmit more data via the radio spectrum and sold specialized chips with the computing power capable of deciphering this cacophony of signals.
• Around the early 2010s, it became unfeasible to pack transistors more densely by shrinking them two dimensionally. One challenge was that, as transistors were shrunk according to Moore’s Law, the narrow length of the conductor channel occasionally caused power to “leak” through the circuit even when the switch was off. On top of this, the layer of silicon dioxide atop each transistor became so thin that quantum effects like “tunneling”—jumping through barriers that classical physics said should be insurmountable—began seriously impacting transistor performance.
• a new 3D transistor, called a FinFET (pronounced finfet), that sets the two ends of the circuit and the channel of semiconductor material that connects them on top of a block, looking like a fin protruding from a whale’s back. The channel that connects the two ends of the circuit can therefore have an electric field applied not only from the top but also from the sides of the fin, enhancing control over the electrons and overcoming the electricity leakage that was threatening the performance of new generations of tiny transistors. These nanometer-scale 3D structures were crucial for the survival of Moore’s Law, but they were staggeringly difficult to make, requiring even more precision in deposition, etching, and lithography.
• all the key EUV components had to be specially created. You can’t simply buy an EUV lightbulb. Producing enough EUV light requires pulverizing a small ball of tin with a laser... The company’s engineers realized the best approach was to shoot a tiny ball of tin measuring thirty-millionths of a meter wide moving through a vacuum at a speed of around two hundred miles per hour. The tin is then struck twice with a laser, the first pulse to warm it up, the second to blast it into a plasma with a temperature around half a million degrees, many times hotter than the surface of the sun. This process of blasting tin is then repeated fifty thousand times per second to produce EUV light in the quantities necessary to fabricate chips.
• a new laser that could pulverize the tin droplets with sufficient power. This required a carbon dioxide−based laser more powerful than any that previously existed... extracting heat from the machine is a key challenge. Trumpf had previously devised a system of blowers with fans that turned a thousand times a second, too fast to rely on physical bearings. Instead, the company learned to use magnets, so the fans floated in air, sucking heat out of the laser system without grinding against other components and imperiling reliability.
• Specialized gases in the laser chamber had to be kept at constant densities. The tin droplets themselves reflected light, which threatened to shine back into the laser and interfere with the system; to prevent this, special optics were required. The company needed industrial diamonds to provide the “windows” through which the laser exited the chamber, and had to work with partners to develop new, ultra-pure diamonds. It took Trumpf a decade to master these challenges and produce lasers with sufficient power and reliability. Each one required exactly 457,329 component parts.
• Zeiss’s primary challenge was that EUV is difficult to reflect... Zeiss began developing mirrors made of one hundred alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon, each layer a couple nanometers thick... Ultimately, Zeiss created mirrors that were the smoothest objects ever made, with impurities that were almost imperceptibly small... To direct EUV light with precision, they must be held perfectly still, requiring mechanics and sensors so exact that Zeiss boasted they could be used to aim a laser to hit a golf ball as far away as the moon.
• The atomic-level unpredictability in light waves’ reaction with photoresist chemicals created new problems with EUV that barely existed with larger-wavelength lithography. To adjust for anomalies in the way light refracts, ASML’s tools project light in a pattern that differs from what chipmakers want imprinted on a chip. Printing an “X” requires using a pattern with a very different shape but which ends up creating an “X” when the light waves hit the silicon wafer.
• Without Intel, there won’t be a single U.S. company—or a single facility outside of Taiwan or South Korea—capable of manufacturing cutting-edge processors. <> Intel entered the 2010s as an outlier in Silicon Valley. Most of America’s biggest firms in the market for logic chips, including Intel’s archrival AMD, had sold their fabs and focused only on design.
• GPUs, by contrast, are designed to run multiple iterations of the same calculation at once. This type of “parallel processing,” it soon became clear, had uses beyond controlling pixels of images in computer games. It could also train AI systems efficiently... For example, Google has designed its own chips called Tensor processing units (TPUs), which are optimized for use with Google’s TensorFlow software library.
• The company had all the ingredients to become a major foundry player, including advanced technology and massive production capacity, but succeeding would have required a major cultural change. TSMC was open with intellectual property, but Intel was closed off and secretive. TSMC was service-oriented, while Intel thought customers should follow its own rules... Most people in the industry think many of the company’s problems stem from Intel’s delayed adoption of EUV tools.
• The only certainty was Xi’s talent as a politician. His own views were hidden behind pursed lips and a feigned smile. <> Behind this smile is a gnawing sense of insecurity that has driven Xi’s policies during the decade he’s ruled China. The primary risk, he believed, was the digital world.
• (China) Fourth, they played foreigners off each other, taking advantage of competition between Silicon Valley firms—and, later, between Americans and Japanese—to get the best deal for themselves.
• economic policymakers and semiconductor industry executives in China would have preferred a strategy of deeper integration, yet leaders in Beijing, who thought more about security than efficiency, saw interdependence as a threat. The Made in China 2025 plan didn’t advocate economic integration but the opposite. It called for slashing China’s dependence on imported chips.
• Other industry analysts suggested the transaction was designed to let Chinese firms claim to the Chinese government they were designing cutting-edge microprocessors in China, when in reality they were simply tweaking AMD designs. The transaction was portrayed in English-language media as a minor licensing deal, but leading Chinese experts told state-owned media the deal supported China’s effort to domesticate “core technologies” so that “we no longer can be pulled around by our noses.”
• Third, globalize relentlessly, not only to seek new customers but also to learn by competing with the world’s best companies. Executing these strategies made Samsung one of the world’s biggest companies, achieving revenues equivalent to 10 percent of South Korea’s entire GDP.
• Theft of intellectual property may well have benefitted the company, but it can’t explain its success. No quantity of intellectual property or trade secrets is enough to build a business as big as Huawei. The company has developed efficient manufacturing processes that have driven down costs and built products that customers see as high-quality.
• By the end of the 2010s, Huawei’s HiSilicon unit was designing some of the world’s most complex chips for smartphones and had become TSMC’s second-largest customer.
• 2G phones could send picture texts; 3G phones opened websites; and 4G made it possible to stream video from almost anywhere. 5G will provide a similar leap forward... With beamforming, a cell tower identifies a device’s location and sends the signal it needs only in that direction. Result: less interference and stronger signals for everyone.
• found that less than 20 percent of the contracts involved companies that are subject to U.S. export controls. In other words, the Chinese military has had little difficulty simply buying cutting-edge U.S. chips off-the-shelf and plugging them into military systems.
• The U.S. military is already fielding the first generation of new autonomous vehicles, like Saildrone, an unmanned windsurfer that can spend months roving the oceans while tracking submarines or intercepting adversaries’ communications.
• even chips designed and produced domestically can have unintended vulnerabilities. In 2018, researchers discovered two fundamental errors in Intel’s widely used microprocessor architecture called Spectre and Meltdown, which enabled the copying of data such as passwords—a huge security flaw.
• These concepts fit naturally with the liberal internationalist ethos that guided officials of both political parties amid America’s unipolar moment. Meetings with foreign companies and governments were more pleasant when everyone pretended that cooperation was win-win. So Washington kept telling itself that the U.S. was running faster, blindly ignoring the deterioration in the U.S. position, the rise in China’s capabilities, and the staggering reliance on Taiwan and South Korea,
• They also presumed China would use its position as the world’s key manufacturer of electronics to insert back doors and to spy more effectively, just as the U.S. had done for decades.
• A Fujian court ruled that Micron was responsible for violating UMC and Jinhua’s patents—patents that had been filed using material stolen from Micron. To “remedy” the situation, Fuzhou Intermediate People’s Court banned Micron from selling twenty-six products in China, the company’s biggest market. <> This was a perfect case study of the state-backed intellectual property theft foreign companies operating in China had long complained of... The China hawks on the NSC were determined to change this dynamic. They saw the Micron case as the type of unfair trade that Trump had promised to fix, even though the president himself displayed no particular interest in Micron.
• When the Chinese city of Wuhan locked down on January 23, 2020,... Except for one facility, that is. Yangzte Memory Technologies Corporation (YMTC), based in Wuhan, is China’s leading producer of NAND memory,
• Chinese firms have also embraced RISC-V, because they see it as geopolitically neutral. In 2019, the RISC-V Foundation, which manages the architecture, moved from the U.S. to Switzerland for this reason. Companies like Alibaba are designing processors based on the RISC-V architecture with this in mind.
• Politicians around the world have therefore misdiagnosed the semiconductor supply chain dilemma. The problem isn’t that the chip industry’s far-flung production processes dealt poorly with COVID and the resulting lockdowns. There are few industries that sailed through the pandemic with so little disruption.
• Beijing knows that Taiwan’s defense strategy is to fight long enough for the U.S. and Japan to arrive and help. The island is so small relative to the cross-strait superpower that there’s no realistic option besides counting on friends. Imagine if Beijing were to use its navy to impose customs checks on a fraction of the ships sailing in and out of Taipei. How would the U.S. respond? A blockade is an act of war, but no one would want to shoot first. If the U.S. did nothing, the impact on Taiwan’s will to fight could be devastating.
• A recent analysis of Russia’s war in Syria found that up to 95 percent of munitions dropped were unguided. The fact that Russia faced shortages of guided cruise missiles within several weeks of attacking Ukraine is also partly due to the sorry state of its semiconductor industry.
• Jim Keller, the star semiconductor designer... has said he sees a clear path toward a fifty times increase in the density with which transistors can be packed on chips. First, he argues, existing fin-shaped transistors can be printed thinner to allow three times as many to be packed together. Next, fin-shaped transistors will be replaced by new tube-shaped transistors, often called “gate-all-around.” These are wire-shaped tubes that let an electric field be applied from all directions—top, sides, and bottom—providing better control of the “switch” to cope with challenges as transistors shrink. These tiny wires will double the density at which transistors can be packed, Keller argues.