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Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict.
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything— from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market — runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.
Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.
Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything— from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market — runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.
Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.
Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2022
About the author
Chris Miller
178 books387 followersChris Miller teaches International History at Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is also Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Eurasia Research Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. (Source: Amazon.com)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,581 reviews
November 28, 2022
I was completely engaged while reading this, because I worked at Texas Instruments, and subsequently at Silicon Valley-based companies for over 30 years. Almost half the book is devoted to the history of the semiconductor industry, and as one who has spent the vast majority of his adult life involved in the tech industry, I found this part fascinating. I did not know that Taiwan's TSMC was founded by an American, Morris Chang, who had been passed over for CEO at Texas Instruments. I had somehow missed the fact that Bob Noyce, of Fairchild Semiconductor fame, also founded Intel. I was not aware of the Dutch company, ASML, and the phenomenal machines it builds to etch ultra-fine silicon chips. Part of my ignorance is explained by the fact that I long ago left the engineering side of tech to enter supply chain management, but I felt a little sheepish nonetheless, not knowing some of the facts about the industry. My other excuse is that I've been on the assembly / integration side of things from the start, not on the semiconductor foundry / fab side.
The book explains the various types of chips, from memory to analog to RF to logic to processors to GPU's, and the various architectures like X86, ARM, and RISC. Chris Miller does an excellent job describing just how amazingly difficult it is to manufacture high-end chips, and how few companies and countries can actually do it. The EUV etching machine manufactured by ASML to create these high-end chips is arguably the most complex machine tool ever created by humans. No other company can successfully build them, and only a few, like TSMC, Intel, Samsung and a handful of others can successfully use them to fabricate silicon wafers. Notably, none of those companies are in China. The only places high end silicon can be successfully manufactured is Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA, Singapore, and a few places in Western Europe. But over 40% of new computing capacity comes from TSMC in Taiwan, and that's a problem.
A big reason the Ukrainians are defeating the Russians is because they are using Western "smart" weapons which are full of semiconductors - think Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and Harpoon anti-ship missiles, not to mention drones. The technological advantage of the US military is huge, but many of the chips used in US weapons are made (the silicon, anyway) in Taiwan. More than 90% of chips are designed in the US or UK, but the majority are manufactured in other countries, mostly Taiwan. This is a large national security problem for the US, given China's public policy to "re-integrate" Taiwan.
Given the strategic nature of high-end computing systems and the need for chips in almost everything, from cars to iPhones to washing machines, it was high time the US got a little bit serious about an industrial policy to encourage US chip makers to manufacture at least some of the silicon wafers for key devices in the US via the CHIPS Act. The bad news is, it takes 4-5 years to get a wafer fab up and running, so we won't see the benefits too soon. We'll just have to hope China does not invade Taiwan before 2027 or so, and I really hope the Pentagon is releasing lots of orders to replace all the weapons being used in Ukraine, because Taiwan also needs as many anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and anti-tank weapons as they can stockpile.
Chip War is an excellent overview of where we are and where we're going with regard to semiconductors, and the reality is we are going to need more and more (and hopefully better and better) each year. At least some of the highest-end chips need to be manufactured in the US if we want to a) be safe from blackmail or attack by China, and b) retain our current edge in high tech.
The book explains the various types of chips, from memory to analog to RF to logic to processors to GPU's, and the various architectures like X86, ARM, and RISC. Chris Miller does an excellent job describing just how amazingly difficult it is to manufacture high-end chips, and how few companies and countries can actually do it. The EUV etching machine manufactured by ASML to create these high-end chips is arguably the most complex machine tool ever created by humans. No other company can successfully build them, and only a few, like TSMC, Intel, Samsung and a handful of others can successfully use them to fabricate silicon wafers. Notably, none of those companies are in China. The only places high end silicon can be successfully manufactured is Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA, Singapore, and a few places in Western Europe. But over 40% of new computing capacity comes from TSMC in Taiwan, and that's a problem.
A big reason the Ukrainians are defeating the Russians is because they are using Western "smart" weapons which are full of semiconductors - think Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and Harpoon anti-ship missiles, not to mention drones. The technological advantage of the US military is huge, but many of the chips used in US weapons are made (the silicon, anyway) in Taiwan. More than 90% of chips are designed in the US or UK, but the majority are manufactured in other countries, mostly Taiwan. This is a large national security problem for the US, given China's public policy to "re-integrate" Taiwan.
Given the strategic nature of high-end computing systems and the need for chips in almost everything, from cars to iPhones to washing machines, it was high time the US got a little bit serious about an industrial policy to encourage US chip makers to manufacture at least some of the silicon wafers for key devices in the US via the CHIPS Act. The bad news is, it takes 4-5 years to get a wafer fab up and running, so we won't see the benefits too soon. We'll just have to hope China does not invade Taiwan before 2027 or so, and I really hope the Pentagon is releasing lots of orders to replace all the weapons being used in Ukraine, because Taiwan also needs as many anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and anti-tank weapons as they can stockpile.
Chip War is an excellent overview of where we are and where we're going with regard to semiconductors, and the reality is we are going to need more and more (and hopefully better and better) each year. At least some of the highest-end chips need to be manufactured in the US if we want to a) be safe from blackmail or attack by China, and b) retain our current edge in high tech.
May 23, 2024
A must-read for anyone interested in electronics, economics and politics.
Chris Miller explains how tiny semiconductors, or microchips, have become essential for everything from our mobile phones to missiles and satellites.
When a country dominates the chip industry, it gains significant influence in the world's technology, economy, and military.
Companies are constantly pushing the boundaries to develop faster, more efficient, and smaller chips.
The book explores the competition between the US, the Soviet Union, and China for control of this crucial technology, with political and economic implications.
It also explains the history of the transistor, chipset, integrated circuit, and semiconductor.
Chris Miller explains how tiny semiconductors, or microchips, have become essential for everything from our mobile phones to missiles and satellites.
When a country dominates the chip industry, it gains significant influence in the world's technology, economy, and military.
Companies are constantly pushing the boundaries to develop faster, more efficient, and smaller chips.
The book explores the competition between the US, the Soviet Union, and China for control of this crucial technology, with political and economic implications.
It also explains the history of the transistor, chipset, integrated circuit, and semiconductor.
September 25, 2024
A sweeping and very engaging read on the computer chips that underpin the modern day economy. Fascinating reading and deeply unsettling how many choke points exist in this key supply chain, given how dependent our lives are of computing power
Over one quantilion (1 with 18 zeroes behind it) transistors were produced by TSMC in 2020
I completely understand how Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology won the FT non-fiction book of the year award!
Fascinating reading and incredibly interesting how dependent on chips our modern day economy is.
Chris Miller takes on this topic from the initial steps during World War II to the Space Race, the Cold War and the current implications.
This is one of the best non-fiction books I have read and it is highly topical as we see in the extreme valuations of Nvidia, Broadcom and the fall of Intel.
Quotes and observations
Chips being as small as half a corona virus
China importing more in chips annually in value than oil
37% of worldwide computing power being produced by TSMC. With Dutch ASML being the only worldwide producer of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.
Space programme making the first integrated circuits commercially viable, since the first iteration cost 50 times as much as conventional circuits used in ENIAC.
Nuclear standoff being a further boon to development of computers and Texas Instruments specifically
Microscopes and Kodak chemicals being used to kickstart mass production of chips (lithography)
Moore’s law from the 1960s finally explained in orgins(and initially just predicted to hold for a decade)
Silicon valley being minted in 1971 as monicker
Soviets being 2 to 4 years behind the USA (with very active spying programme) but being impaired by a copying strategy, focused on defense instead of consumer applications
Sony being co-founded by a 16th generation scion of a sake brewery
Texas Instruments and Sony starting a JV to produce transistors in Japan
Already in 1963 Fairchild Semiconductors outsourcing their production to Hong Kong and Singapore
Vietnam bombs only hitting their targets 9.2% of the time, offering a large new market to Texas Instruments to design laser guided bombs, powered by ever smaller computer circuits. Meanwhile Taiwan courted Texas Instruments in 1968 to integrate itself closer into the USA economic system
Intel standing for Integrated Electronics, capitalising on a revolution in memory chips, required in every system, followed by the introduction of the microprocessor
HP proving in 1972 that same price Japanese chips were 4 times less likely to be defective
Japan spending 8 times more in R&D in the 1980s than the USSR
In the Gulf war laser guided missiles being 13 times as accurate than regular weapons
TSMC getting 48% seed funding from the Taiwanese government, with Philips providing another quarter. This latter investment helped ASML, spun-off from Philips, to grow later one
Economic war against Japan being ended in 1990s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War
Intel turning down producing chips for Nintendo’s handheld devices and the contract for the iPhone. This leading to a loss of grip on the mobile device market, now accounting for 70% of the usage of chips
Samsung, TSMC, USMC (also Taiwanese) and Global Foundries being the only at scale smartphone chip producers initially in the 2000s, with the latter pulling out in the transition to UEV.
Intel investing $4b in ASML in 2012 to fascilitate the change to extreme UV machine production, with ASML being in turn dependent on German producers of mirrors and lasers.
Intel bungling UEV production and losing the monopoly on datacenter CPUs to better chips of Nvidia, ARM and AMD, more geared to AI image processing
$260b of chips being bought by China in 2017, with China only owning 6% of the semiconductor supply chain (including IP)
Samsung its revenue being 10% of South Korea GDP
Huawei spending $15m per year, when revenue were only $1b, on IBM consultants to streamline its production, and espousing “wolf culture”, where sacrifice for the greater good is essential
Tesla developing its own chips for management of its electric cars, forming a new entrant to the sector
Incredible high stakes geopolitical cold war between China and the USA in respect to Taiwan and TSMCs production facilities, which produces 37% of logic chips and hence total computing power annually churned out
Even the Pentagon staggers for the cost of new chip factories, being twice as much as a cutting edge aircraft carrier, while only being useful for a few year
The durability of Moore’s law in other words has surprised even the person who it is named after and the person who coined it. It may well surprise todays pessimist too.
Over one quantilion (1 with 18 zeroes behind it) transistors were produced by TSMC in 2020
I completely understand how Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology won the FT non-fiction book of the year award!
Fascinating reading and incredibly interesting how dependent on chips our modern day economy is.
Chris Miller takes on this topic from the initial steps during World War II to the Space Race, the Cold War and the current implications.
This is one of the best non-fiction books I have read and it is highly topical as we see in the extreme valuations of Nvidia, Broadcom and the fall of Intel.
Quotes and observations
Chips being as small as half a corona virus
China importing more in chips annually in value than oil
37% of worldwide computing power being produced by TSMC. With Dutch ASML being the only worldwide producer of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.
Space programme making the first integrated circuits commercially viable, since the first iteration cost 50 times as much as conventional circuits used in ENIAC.
Nuclear standoff being a further boon to development of computers and Texas Instruments specifically
Microscopes and Kodak chemicals being used to kickstart mass production of chips (lithography)
Moore’s law from the 1960s finally explained in orgins(and initially just predicted to hold for a decade)
Silicon valley being minted in 1971 as monicker
Soviets being 2 to 4 years behind the USA (with very active spying programme) but being impaired by a copying strategy, focused on defense instead of consumer applications
Sony being co-founded by a 16th generation scion of a sake brewery
Texas Instruments and Sony starting a JV to produce transistors in Japan
Already in 1963 Fairchild Semiconductors outsourcing their production to Hong Kong and Singapore
Vietnam bombs only hitting their targets 9.2% of the time, offering a large new market to Texas Instruments to design laser guided bombs, powered by ever smaller computer circuits. Meanwhile Taiwan courted Texas Instruments in 1968 to integrate itself closer into the USA economic system
Intel standing for Integrated Electronics, capitalising on a revolution in memory chips, required in every system, followed by the introduction of the microprocessor
HP proving in 1972 that same price Japanese chips were 4 times less likely to be defective
Japan spending 8 times more in R&D in the 1980s than the USSR
In the Gulf war laser guided missiles being 13 times as accurate than regular weapons
TSMC getting 48% seed funding from the Taiwanese government, with Philips providing another quarter. This latter investment helped ASML, spun-off from Philips, to grow later one
Economic war against Japan being ended in 1990s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War
Intel turning down producing chips for Nintendo’s handheld devices and the contract for the iPhone. This leading to a loss of grip on the mobile device market, now accounting for 70% of the usage of chips
Samsung, TSMC, USMC (also Taiwanese) and Global Foundries being the only at scale smartphone chip producers initially in the 2000s, with the latter pulling out in the transition to UEV.
Intel investing $4b in ASML in 2012 to fascilitate the change to extreme UV machine production, with ASML being in turn dependent on German producers of mirrors and lasers.
Intel bungling UEV production and losing the monopoly on datacenter CPUs to better chips of Nvidia, ARM and AMD, more geared to AI image processing
$260b of chips being bought by China in 2017, with China only owning 6% of the semiconductor supply chain (including IP)
Samsung its revenue being 10% of South Korea GDP
Huawei spending $15m per year, when revenue were only $1b, on IBM consultants to streamline its production, and espousing “wolf culture”, where sacrifice for the greater good is essential
Tesla developing its own chips for management of its electric cars, forming a new entrant to the sector
Incredible high stakes geopolitical cold war between China and the USA in respect to Taiwan and TSMCs production facilities, which produces 37% of logic chips and hence total computing power annually churned out
Even the Pentagon staggers for the cost of new chip factories, being twice as much as a cutting edge aircraft carrier, while only being useful for a few year
The durability of Moore’s law in other words has surprised even the person who it is named after and the person who coined it. It may well surprise todays pessimist too.
October 23, 2022
Chip War is an outstanding history of the microchips from their invention up until just about the current moment (hopefully the eventual paperback edition will add some context on the significant recent U.S. policy shift on chips). It is written in a relatively easy and entertaining style that makes it easy to digest what is clearly a work of substantial depth of reporting and history. The book covers the global nature of microchips—the rise and fall of the fortunes of different companies and countries, the evolving division of labor in chip production, the ways in which government policy have been integral to developments at various stages but have also failed. Overall it serves an excellent primer on the different types of chips, their different uses and the ways in which their global supply chains operate. It also accomplishes much more with a diagnosis of the current moment and recommendations for the future.
Some of the parts were completely new to me—like the Soviet and then Russian efforts to develop their own microchip industries. Other parts added substantial depth to aspects of the microchip ecosystem we have today, like the origins of the ASML as the only supplier of high-tech and the ways in which TSMC became the only fab for the most high tech chips. One part that was not new to me, but I appreciated because so many people get it wrong, is that he emphasizes that the chip shortage in 2021 and 2022 was largely the result of dramatically increased demand for chips for consumer electronics rather than some worsening of supply—in fact he depicts the efforts China took to keep chip factories running even when everything else shut down due to the pandemic.
Chris Miller does not spend much time discussing the underlying science and engineering except insofar as it is necessary to understand the economics. The description of the cost and scientific/engineering breakthroughs needed for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography needed to make even smaller transistors was especially vivid.
Much of the book is about the interplay of civilian and military considerations in the development of chips. Initially the military was the primary consumer of them, buying something like 90 percent (I believe, did not recheck the number). A big breakthrough was putting them in Minutemen II missiles which increased their accuracy enough to mean they could more effectively take out Russian missiles. Over time, however, consumer uses grew while military fell—not to something like 2 percent of total chip production. Moreover it is way too expensive for the military to do its own fabrication and in many cases even its own design, investments that are not just costly but would be obsolescent in a few years time. The increased reliance on consumer demand was a strength of Western and Asian allied innovation, consumer electronics in Japan played a role that the Soviet Union with its largely military industry could never match.
The main purpose of all of this history and analysis is to understand the current moment, particularly the vulnerability of the global economy to anything that happened to TSMC (a massive earthquake or a Chinese invasion/blockade), the United States impressive position as a global chokepoint for many of the most important technologies but lack of anything resembling self reliance, and China’s struggle to overcome its huge deficit in technology and relatively unimportant role in both the global supply chain and producing for its own needs. While I mostly agree with the author’s diagnosis and policy advocacy at times he was a bit overly simplistic and editorial in his judgments of the Obama administration, the battles within the Trump administration and where policy is now. Some of that read less like history and more like an oped written in the heat of the moment.
Overall, Chip War is a fabulous guide to the global economy, appreciating one of the major security challenges facing the United States, and formulating a better understanding for handling it going forward. As an up-to-the-moment guide it leaves the reader excited to read the sequel—does Moore’s Law still hold? What happens to Intel? Does China start making higher-tech chips? Does Taiwan stay peaceful? I look forward to watching all of this play out in real time—and it might play out slightly better if policymakers and the public are better informed by reading this book.
Some of the parts were completely new to me—like the Soviet and then Russian efforts to develop their own microchip industries. Other parts added substantial depth to aspects of the microchip ecosystem we have today, like the origins of the ASML as the only supplier of high-tech and the ways in which TSMC became the only fab for the most high tech chips. One part that was not new to me, but I appreciated because so many people get it wrong, is that he emphasizes that the chip shortage in 2021 and 2022 was largely the result of dramatically increased demand for chips for consumer electronics rather than some worsening of supply—in fact he depicts the efforts China took to keep chip factories running even when everything else shut down due to the pandemic.
Chris Miller does not spend much time discussing the underlying science and engineering except insofar as it is necessary to understand the economics. The description of the cost and scientific/engineering breakthroughs needed for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography needed to make even smaller transistors was especially vivid.
Much of the book is about the interplay of civilian and military considerations in the development of chips. Initially the military was the primary consumer of them, buying something like 90 percent (I believe, did not recheck the number). A big breakthrough was putting them in Minutemen II missiles which increased their accuracy enough to mean they could more effectively take out Russian missiles. Over time, however, consumer uses grew while military fell—not to something like 2 percent of total chip production. Moreover it is way too expensive for the military to do its own fabrication and in many cases even its own design, investments that are not just costly but would be obsolescent in a few years time. The increased reliance on consumer demand was a strength of Western and Asian allied innovation, consumer electronics in Japan played a role that the Soviet Union with its largely military industry could never match.
The main purpose of all of this history and analysis is to understand the current moment, particularly the vulnerability of the global economy to anything that happened to TSMC (a massive earthquake or a Chinese invasion/blockade), the United States impressive position as a global chokepoint for many of the most important technologies but lack of anything resembling self reliance, and China’s struggle to overcome its huge deficit in technology and relatively unimportant role in both the global supply chain and producing for its own needs. While I mostly agree with the author’s diagnosis and policy advocacy at times he was a bit overly simplistic and editorial in his judgments of the Obama administration, the battles within the Trump administration and where policy is now. Some of that read less like history and more like an oped written in the heat of the moment.
Overall, Chip War is a fabulous guide to the global economy, appreciating one of the major security challenges facing the United States, and formulating a better understanding for handling it going forward. As an up-to-the-moment guide it leaves the reader excited to read the sequel—does Moore’s Law still hold? What happens to Intel? Does China start making higher-tech chips? Does Taiwan stay peaceful? I look forward to watching all of this play out in real time—and it might play out slightly better if policymakers and the public are better informed by reading this book.
October 8, 2022
I write this review a few days after the book's publication and the day after the US announced a sweeping set of restrictions on US tools sold to any advanced Chinese semiconductor chip manufacturer. There could not have been a more forceful endorsement of the relevance of any book.
Chip War is more than topical. It presents a highly readable history of the industry. While refreshingly unbiased in many arguments, the book sheds light on the thinking pervasive amongst US policymakers. In a world where most software (from the search to finance to consumer use related) is relatively easily replicable, most policymakers feel that the non-duplicable part of the technology industry is what one can do on a silicon wafer. The US believes that it is the leader in this segment - along with a few others who are a part of its influence sphere - and should use not just innovations but also other political tools to retain supremacy.
The author is clear in drawing his lessons from a chronological set of main events and personalities that built the industry in the West. The following are some of the questions not asked in the book but worth thinking about based on the same historical facts.
a. If one looks at the market caps of upstream chip manufacturers as a percentage of the total technology industry capitalization over time, semi-companies do not seem to hold as much monopoly power or importance in the eyes of investors as believed in many other circles
b. While the book mentions a good number of early innovators by name from the earliest decades, there has been almost no named scientist in the last twenty-five years (this is eons in the tech industry). There are several potential reasons behind here: narratives and tales surrounding innovators are far more common in the United States than in Eastern nations. Also, innovation stories are more relatable when they are easier to understand - most semiconductor manufacturing innovations for the last thirty years are in detail and not in broad subjects like transistor or UV lithography. And lastly, the latest tech innovations are team- and resource-based rather than individual-driven.
c. Semiconductor manufacturing knowledge is highly diffused. Many in the US may feel that the knowledge is all American because of the work of the earliest giants, but this is no different from if Europe were to seek credit for early innovations in internal combustion engines or nuclear theories. Even if some of the knowledge had been previously stolen, the most critical parts of advanced manufacturing now are not all necessarily in the US. The rise of the likes of TSMC and Samsung Electronics, along with the inability of American companies to keep pace, are proof. The diffusion of the know-how happened quite early as reflected in the dominance of the Japanese - well described in the book - in the 1980s.
d. Nobody has been able to maintain dominance in this space for long. The book is littered with the tale of well-known names that led the space for a few short years. From Fairchild, Texas Instruments, through Motorola, Nikon, and now Intel, one can name a couple of dozen companies that seemingly had an unbeatable innovation lead only to see someone else take over. Is semiconductor manufacturing so challenging to master that a lot of money and an army of engineers cannot solve it without being a part of an existing establishment?
e. One wonders if the military establishment needs instruments created by the most advanced fabs of this year? It is clear that most rival superpowers of the world have access to technologies of a few years ago - say 2014/5 - even if they are blocked on the latest fabs. If, in the worst case, either the US or China does not have access to the latest processes of - say - TSMC, how bad is that truly?
f. Irrespective of whether semis are indeed the new oil or not (some of the questions posed above suggest that the industry might not be as critical or unique as made out to be), perceptions are going to keep them at the center in global geopolitics. The industry makes Taiwan far more pivotal for both US and China in their rivalry. The developments are likely to make China more committed to self-sufficiency in semis. It might not be as difficult as presumed, even if they remain somewhat behind compared to the cutting edge.
g. There is a tendency amongst some US nationalists (at times in the book too) to look down upon others' progress. If they see an advanced fab in a foreign land, they feel it is because of a transfer of technology or worse, or because of the low cost of debt (never mind the low cost of equity funding in the US), subsidization, government policies, etc. A lot of this is true, but even more accurate is the rapid, unheralded, vast number of innovations - as reflected in the patents filed - in these Asian countries.
Even fifty years on, Chip War is about a fast-changing industry. It is about the world's most politically colored industry also. The book will surely become dated soon, but the sections on the early days will be helpful for any reader who wants to learn how the industry evolved in its first few phases.
Chip War is more than topical. It presents a highly readable history of the industry. While refreshingly unbiased in many arguments, the book sheds light on the thinking pervasive amongst US policymakers. In a world where most software (from the search to finance to consumer use related) is relatively easily replicable, most policymakers feel that the non-duplicable part of the technology industry is what one can do on a silicon wafer. The US believes that it is the leader in this segment - along with a few others who are a part of its influence sphere - and should use not just innovations but also other political tools to retain supremacy.
The author is clear in drawing his lessons from a chronological set of main events and personalities that built the industry in the West. The following are some of the questions not asked in the book but worth thinking about based on the same historical facts.
a. If one looks at the market caps of upstream chip manufacturers as a percentage of the total technology industry capitalization over time, semi-companies do not seem to hold as much monopoly power or importance in the eyes of investors as believed in many other circles
b. While the book mentions a good number of early innovators by name from the earliest decades, there has been almost no named scientist in the last twenty-five years (this is eons in the tech industry). There are several potential reasons behind here: narratives and tales surrounding innovators are far more common in the United States than in Eastern nations. Also, innovation stories are more relatable when they are easier to understand - most semiconductor manufacturing innovations for the last thirty years are in detail and not in broad subjects like transistor or UV lithography. And lastly, the latest tech innovations are team- and resource-based rather than individual-driven.
c. Semiconductor manufacturing knowledge is highly diffused. Many in the US may feel that the knowledge is all American because of the work of the earliest giants, but this is no different from if Europe were to seek credit for early innovations in internal combustion engines or nuclear theories. Even if some of the knowledge had been previously stolen, the most critical parts of advanced manufacturing now are not all necessarily in the US. The rise of the likes of TSMC and Samsung Electronics, along with the inability of American companies to keep pace, are proof. The diffusion of the know-how happened quite early as reflected in the dominance of the Japanese - well described in the book - in the 1980s.
d. Nobody has been able to maintain dominance in this space for long. The book is littered with the tale of well-known names that led the space for a few short years. From Fairchild, Texas Instruments, through Motorola, Nikon, and now Intel, one can name a couple of dozen companies that seemingly had an unbeatable innovation lead only to see someone else take over. Is semiconductor manufacturing so challenging to master that a lot of money and an army of engineers cannot solve it without being a part of an existing establishment?
e. One wonders if the military establishment needs instruments created by the most advanced fabs of this year? It is clear that most rival superpowers of the world have access to technologies of a few years ago - say 2014/5 - even if they are blocked on the latest fabs. If, in the worst case, either the US or China does not have access to the latest processes of - say - TSMC, how bad is that truly?
f. Irrespective of whether semis are indeed the new oil or not (some of the questions posed above suggest that the industry might not be as critical or unique as made out to be), perceptions are going to keep them at the center in global geopolitics. The industry makes Taiwan far more pivotal for both US and China in their rivalry. The developments are likely to make China more committed to self-sufficiency in semis. It might not be as difficult as presumed, even if they remain somewhat behind compared to the cutting edge.
g. There is a tendency amongst some US nationalists (at times in the book too) to look down upon others' progress. If they see an advanced fab in a foreign land, they feel it is because of a transfer of technology or worse, or because of the low cost of debt (never mind the low cost of equity funding in the US), subsidization, government policies, etc. A lot of this is true, but even more accurate is the rapid, unheralded, vast number of innovations - as reflected in the patents filed - in these Asian countries.
Even fifty years on, Chip War is about a fast-changing industry. It is about the world's most politically colored industry also. The book will surely become dated soon, but the sections on the early days will be helpful for any reader who wants to learn how the industry evolved in its first few phases.
April 1, 2023
Image: An ASML advanced lithography machine which patterns millions of microscopic transistors, each much smaller than a human cell, onto chips using extreme ultraviolet light. Source
Chip:
noun "a small piece of semiconducting material, usually silicon, with millions or billions of microscopic transistors carved into it." Also known as a semiconductor or integrated circuit
In the summer of '21, I went with my partner to the local Toyota dealership to purchase a new car. I expected her to drive off the lot with one, just as I had done in the past when purchasing new vehicles. It was her first "new" vehicle and we were both thrilled for her to get it....
......only to be told at the dealership that she would have to wait until one was made! What?!
The car she picked was a popular one, including the color. Why weren't there several shiny, new ones on the lot, waiting to be adopted?
We had noticed when we pulled in how few cars there were and that most of them looked used, but didn't pay too much attention to it.
Now the dealer told her it would probably be 3-4 weeks until she could drive home with "Bianca". He opened his computer and found one of her model and color, hybridized. He then "purchased" it for her, telling her the date it would be built, 3 1/2 weeks hence.
So weird, I thought. Why are they doing it this way now?!
When I asked the dealer, he mumbled something about there not being enough chips and cars need "a chip" (*ha, haa!!). He didn't elaborate when I asked further questions; I don't think he knew more than that.
If only I'd had this book then, I would have understood.
Wow, did I learn a lot from it. My head is reeling with all the new information. Those five stars I gave it? They aren't enough. The best books for me are the ones in which I learn new things and this one? I think my brain needs an upgrade with a better memory chip and processing unit to store and make sense of it all.
Author Chris Miller relates the history of computing and how the chip, especially the general processing unit (GPU), revolutionized computers and brought about those ubiquitous and ever more powerful handheld ones most of us can't live without.
Many of the terms were new to me, most I'd heard but only had a fuzzy idea of what they meant. I did a heck of a lot of highlighting in this book (thank goodness for chips and tablets to read on; had I done this to the library's copy, I might be out of a job).
There is a lot of tech science and a lot of geopolitics. You can't have one without the other when it comes to modern technology.
The author traces the history of chips, and discusses the various people who made breakthroughs in their design and production, making ever smaller and more powerful chips. Sixty years ago, a cutting edge chip had a mere FOUR transistors. Today they have 11.8 billion.
Look at your phone. It most likely has 10 or more chips. Each of those chips have 11.8 billion transistors. I'm not a math whiz but I can say without a calculator that that's a hell of a lot of transistors.
Mr Miller also discusses the history of various tech companies, such as Samsung (started out as a dried fish and vegetables company!), Qualcomm, Intel, and TSMC.
Taiwan now leads the world in chip production, especially high end chips. Taiwan "produces 11 percent of the world’s memory chips. More important, it fabricates 37 percent of the world’s logic chips."
Because of that, "China’s ruling party has no higher goal than asserting control over Taiwan". It may be a small country, but Taiwan has become a very important one. The chips produced in its TSMC manufacturing company cannot currently be built anywhere else in the world.
China"now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil" and "is devoting its best minds and billions of dollars to developing its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America’s chip choke. If Beijing succeeds, it will remake the global economy and reset the balance of military power."
I did not realize how these tiny bits of silicon run our modern world, how reliant we are upon them, and how both the US and China (among other countries) are desperate to control their production.
I found all of this utterly fascinating. The way chips are made is incredible and I was thrilled to learn about it. And the way these tiny chips affect everything in our lives, including our ability to drive off the lot with a new car, is incredible.
I started making a list of all the items in my home which have chips in order to figure out how many chips we "own". However, as that list grew and grew, I realized I didn't need to look up how many chips each of those products have to know that there are at least hundreds of them in our home. And many more outside in the driveway.
To anyone wanting to learn more about chips, how they're made or the importance of them to governments around the world (including why Russia hasn't been able to overtake Ukraine), I highly recommend this book.
*That "ha, haa" when the dealer said cars need "a chip"? There are often over a thousand chips in modern cars. Not one. 1,000!
May 23, 2023
This book has some good information (which has been addressed by other reviewers) but it also has some blatantly obvious bias.. there's more than a little "Ra-Ra America and Capitalism is the best", sinophobia directed heavily at China for doing... the same kind of things that the US does. The author sneers at Chinese govt subsidies funding chip manufacturers in that country but is fine with US companies getting govt funding for research or from the pentagon. He also laments the USA's "defeat in Vietnam" with an "if only our bombs had been better at killing North Vietnamese people" passage. bottom line: not without educational value but it's shown through a glaringly Pro-US, Pro-Capitalism and Pro-Militarism lens.
January 21, 2023
This book starts with the invention of the transistor and follows with how its existence inspired entrepreneurs, investors, and politicians. All through this story the book keeps making reference to Moore's Law as if it was preordained scripture. As the transistors improved and manufacturing techniques improved the centers of activity spread through locations such as Silicon Valley, Texas, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other Southeast Asian nations. The frantic scramble of the Soviets to keep up with the West by copying the technology is also described.
And then we arrived at the situation we have today where China, wanting very much to be independent from western sources, is looking across the Taiwan Straight with envious eyes to where the world's most advanced transistor manufacturing is located.
The following quote from the book summaries the unique and potentially unstable nature of computer chip manufacturing.
This book made me aware of what the chip manufacturers have managed to do. I didn't realized before reading this book that they are putting parts together that are smaller than a virus. For comparison, the COVID virus is 125 nanometers in diameter. The electrical connectors between each transistor in the logic processor chip of an "Apple A15" iPhone is 5 nanometers wide. This allows that phone to contain 15,000,000,000 transistors in a chip that's less than 1/2 inch square. And all those transistors are wired together in a design so complicated that only AI programing can come up with a workable arrangement.
I've placed my own personal astonishment of chip manufacturing in the following
And then we arrived at the situation we have today where China, wanting very much to be independent from western sources, is looking across the Taiwan Straight with envious eyes to where the world's most advanced transistor manufacturing is located.
The following quote from the book summaries the unique and potentially unstable nature of computer chip manufacturing.
No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms. Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year. Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips. The Dutch company AML builds 100 percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC's 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison. The global network of companies that annually produces a trillion chips at nanometer scale is a triumph of efficiency. It's also a staggering vulnerability. The disruptions of the pandemic provide just a glimpse of what a single well-placed earthquake could do to the global economy. (p.xxv)The above quote references the seismic instability of the region. The proximity of China seems even more ominous. The book devotes significant attention to China's use of its significant funds and large potential customer market to leverage business deals that will result in locating the most advance technology in their own country.
This book made me aware of what the chip manufacturers have managed to do. I didn't realized before reading this book that they are putting parts together that are smaller than a virus. For comparison, the COVID virus is 125 nanometers in diameter. The electrical connectors between each transistor in the logic processor chip of an "Apple A15" iPhone is 5 nanometers wide. This allows that phone to contain 15,000,000,000 transistors in a chip that's less than 1/2 inch square. And all those transistors are wired together in a design so complicated that only AI programing can come up with a workable arrangement.
I've placed my own personal astonishment of chip manufacturing in the following
June 11, 2023
Glad to be done with this one.
I learned a bit from this book about chips and the semiconductor industry (i think), but the story is so poorly told that the mind just glazes over after awhile.
One gets the sense Miller didnt really know how to organise all his information, his dramatis personae, nor his settings, so what emerges is an interminable conveyor belt of barely-coherent technical jargon, indistinguishable characters, and their origin stories. There chapters don't converge, nor is there a clear overarching narrative. The reader is just forced to endure page after page of painfully bland description, spiced with a few choice phrases.
The narrative also flits between the USA, China, South Korea and Taiwan - but there is in the end no distinct sense of place other than the author slapping a label onto the chapter.
The net result of this highly descriptive, but uninspired and repetitive prose, is that I end up not really caring about the story at all. Yes, I KNOW now how chips are important to the modern world, but the writing makes me not really CARE at all. Which is kind of disappointing given how much potential this story has.
Maybe the content would have done better in the hands of a more experienced storyteller, and maybe I was expecting something a little more along the lines of Nicole Perlroth's "This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends". A disappointingly bland read.
I learned a bit from this book about chips and the semiconductor industry (i think), but the story is so poorly told that the mind just glazes over after awhile.
One gets the sense Miller didnt really know how to organise all his information, his dramatis personae, nor his settings, so what emerges is an interminable conveyor belt of barely-coherent technical jargon, indistinguishable characters, and their origin stories. There chapters don't converge, nor is there a clear overarching narrative. The reader is just forced to endure page after page of painfully bland description, spiced with a few choice phrases.
The narrative also flits between the USA, China, South Korea and Taiwan - but there is in the end no distinct sense of place other than the author slapping a label onto the chapter.
The net result of this highly descriptive, but uninspired and repetitive prose, is that I end up not really caring about the story at all. Yes, I KNOW now how chips are important to the modern world, but the writing makes me not really CARE at all. Which is kind of disappointing given how much potential this story has.
Maybe the content would have done better in the hands of a more experienced storyteller, and maybe I was expecting something a little more along the lines of Nicole Perlroth's "This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends". A disappointingly bland read.
December 24, 2022
Impressive. Very detailed, with both historical context and current situation assessment.
Personally, I had a bunch of questions I've failed to get answered so far, and here's where "Chip War" has helped - I believe my understanding of the situation has improved significantly. It doesn't make me more comfortable (as the global geo-political situation is tense), but at least the foreign policies make more sense.
Strongly recommended for anyone interested in XXI tech, politics, or both. There's a big chance it may get outdated quite quickly, so grab it while it's still hot.
Personally, I had a bunch of questions I've failed to get answered so far, and here's where "Chip War" has helped - I believe my understanding of the situation has improved significantly. It doesn't make me more comfortable (as the global geo-political situation is tense), but at least the foreign policies make more sense.
Strongly recommended for anyone interested in XXI tech, politics, or both. There's a big chance it may get outdated quite quickly, so grab it while it's still hot.
November 11, 2023
I found Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, a history of the semiconductor industry, unexpectedly fascinating. Although written in a journalistic style it is dense with information, which reminded me of Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. I think it's an important book for understanding how technology has shifted the loci of economic power across the world in the past sixty years. Although written from an American perspective, it offers a lot of insight into how chip manufacture became concentrated in a handful of East Asian companies.
The early history of how semiconductors were invented really emphasises how deeply entwined computing was with wars and the military-industrial complex. It was interesting to learn about the USSR's attempts to keep up with American chip technology during the Cold War, always struggling with quality control when using the requisite advanced manufacturing techniques. Also notable in the historical chapters is the fact that, 'It was mostly men who designed the earliest semiconductors, and mostly women who assembled them'. There is a depressing theme of searching the globe for the cheapest skilled labour and consistently resisting attempts to unionise:
I did not previously realise the importance of chips in weapons and found the chapters on this topic quite chilling. The automation of weaponry continues to increase, yet the concentration of the chip industry also creates military vulnerabilities. Apparently Russia is currently suffering a severe shortage due to Ukraine War sanctions, so is reduced to using chips from domestic appliances in weapons.
Part VIII of the book concerns China's recent rise as a chip manufacturer. An infographic notes that China produces 15% of all chips, mostly low-tech, but the industry is expanding rapidly with heavy government support. The detailed discussion of Huawei begs the question posed in Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise: what in China isn't a sovereign wealth fund? Can any large Chinese company be considered otherwise? I found Miller's explanation of the conflict between the US and China over chip intellectual property and security during the Obama and Trump presidencies useful. It was covered in the media quite superficially, so I hadn't really grasped what was going on:
Miller projects the disastrous impact on the entire global economy if Taiwan's TSMC chip factories were put out of action in a war with China. This would not be in the interests of China, or anyone else really, but is a real risk if armed conflict were to break out between China and the US. The structure of the chip industry almost looks like a globally-distributed series of natural monopolies for different chip types, which means interdependence and limited competition awkwardly coexist:
Over the decades chips have become more and more expensive and complex to manufacture as, 'each generation of technological improvement made fabs more expensive'. The equipment now used to make advanced semiconductors is mindblowingly complicated, costs two hundred million dollars to build, and requires tens of thousands of components sourced from around the world: 'ASML's EUV lithography tool is the most expensive mass-produced machine tool in history'. Intel alone invested $4 BILLION in developing this machine. The only way to get a passable return on such outlandish sums is to manufacture and sell humungous quantities of chips.
These economies of scale based on vast investments in equipment have led to an extraordinary concentration of the market, with profound geopolitical implications. What a fascinating unintended consequence of globalised capitalism these monopolies are! Despite lack of immediate competition, the industry is trapped in an endless race to cram more transistors on each chip using more and more expensive machines, and for what? So that surveillance capitalism can gather yet more personal data and generative so-called AI can fill the internet with sludge? It was useful to gain understanding of the hardware side of Silicon Valley, which gets much less attention than software and online platforms in the technology books I've read to date.
I found Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology a very thought-provoking reminder that daily life in 2023 depends upon a myriad of miniscule semiconductors that I had not previously considered the provenance of. Miller conveys an impressive quantity of information in an accessible style, providing considerable insight into the peculiarities of these lynchpins in the global economy.
The early history of how semiconductors were invented really emphasises how deeply entwined computing was with wars and the military-industrial complex. It was interesting to learn about the USSR's attempts to keep up with American chip technology during the Cold War, always struggling with quality control when using the requisite advanced manufacturing techniques. Also notable in the historical chapters is the fact that, 'It was mostly men who designed the earliest semiconductors, and mostly women who assembled them'. There is a depressing theme of searching the globe for the cheapest skilled labour and consistently resisting attempts to unionise:
Semiconductors recast the economies and politics of America's friends in the region. Cities that had been breeding grounds for political radicalism were transformed by diligent assembly line workers, happy to trade unemployment or subsistence farming for better paying jobs in factories. By the early 1980s, the electronics industry accounted for 7 percent of Singapore's GNP and a quarter of its manufacturing jobs. Of electronics production, 60 percent was semiconductor devices, and much of the rest was goods that couldn't work without semiconductors. In Hong Kong, electronic manufacturing created more jobs than any industry except textiles.
I did not previously realise the importance of chips in weapons and found the chapters on this topic quite chilling. The automation of weaponry continues to increase, yet the concentration of the chip industry also creates military vulnerabilities. Apparently Russia is currently suffering a severe shortage due to Ukraine War sanctions, so is reduced to using chips from domestic appliances in weapons.
Part VIII of the book concerns China's recent rise as a chip manufacturer. An infographic notes that China produces 15% of all chips, mostly low-tech, but the industry is expanding rapidly with heavy government support. The detailed discussion of Huawei begs the question posed in Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise: what in China isn't a sovereign wealth fund? Can any large Chinese company be considered otherwise? I found Miller's explanation of the conflict between the US and China over chip intellectual property and security during the Obama and Trump presidencies useful. It was covered in the media quite superficially, so I hadn't really grasped what was going on:
In Washington and in the chip industry, almost everyone had drunk their own kool-aid about globalisation. Newspapers and academics alike reported that globalisation was in fact 'global', that technological diffusion was unstoppable, that other countries' advancing technological capabilities were in the US interest, and that even if they weren't, nothing could halt technological progress. [...] However, 'globalisation' of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; 'Taiwanisation' had. Technology hadn't diffused. It was monopolised by a handful of irreplaceable companies.
Miller projects the disastrous impact on the entire global economy if Taiwan's TSMC chip factories were put out of action in a war with China. This would not be in the interests of China, or anyone else really, but is a real risk if armed conflict were to break out between China and the US. The structure of the chip industry almost looks like a globally-distributed series of natural monopolies for different chip types, which means interdependence and limited competition awkwardly coexist:
However, the messages coming from the chip industry weren't any more coherent than the contradictory leaks from the Trump White House. Publicly, semiconductor CEOs and their lobbyists urged the new administration to work with China and encourage it to comply with trade agreements. Privately, they admitted this strategy was hopeless and feared that state-supported Chinese competitors would grab market share at their expense. The entire chip industry depended on sales to China - be it chipmakers like Intel, fabless designers like Qualcomm, or equipment manufacturers like Applied Materials. One US semiconductor executive wryly summed things up to a White House official: "Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor".
Over the decades chips have become more and more expensive and complex to manufacture as, 'each generation of technological improvement made fabs more expensive'. The equipment now used to make advanced semiconductors is mindblowingly complicated, costs two hundred million dollars to build, and requires tens of thousands of components sourced from around the world: 'ASML's EUV lithography tool is the most expensive mass-produced machine tool in history'. Intel alone invested $4 BILLION in developing this machine. The only way to get a passable return on such outlandish sums is to manufacture and sell humungous quantities of chips.
These economies of scale based on vast investments in equipment have led to an extraordinary concentration of the market, with profound geopolitical implications. What a fascinating unintended consequence of globalised capitalism these monopolies are! Despite lack of immediate competition, the industry is trapped in an endless race to cram more transistors on each chip using more and more expensive machines, and for what? So that surveillance capitalism can gather yet more personal data and generative so-called AI can fill the internet with sludge? It was useful to gain understanding of the hardware side of Silicon Valley, which gets much less attention than software and online platforms in the technology books I've read to date.
I found Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology a very thought-provoking reminder that daily life in 2023 depends upon a myriad of miniscule semiconductors that I had not previously considered the provenance of. Miller conveys an impressive quantity of information in an accessible style, providing considerable insight into the peculiarities of these lynchpins in the global economy.
January 2, 2023
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller, is an interesting book that examines the semiconductor in history and through supply chain economics and geopolitics. The semiconductor/microchip is a fascinating piece of technology that utilizes silicon and the control of the flow of electrons to create gateways and switches. The book follows the development of this technology in the 1950's, through the era of Moore's Law, and into the modern world. The tech was developed in the United States in the post World War II era, first used in early computers, and heavily funded by the US government, especially the Department of Defense. Chips were especially useful in guiding missiles and munitions. As chips began to be crafted smaller and smaller, and with more and more processors, the technique of lithography for grafting and creating very tiny parts became important. Lithography is the use of light to "etch" into materials, and allows for the construction of molds for chips that are barely bigger than a few atoms.
The book follows the development of company's like Texas Instruments, Intel, Samsung, TMSC, Huawei, and more, as the chip industry began to develop. Essentially, the US industry has historically dominated the chip market, but as costs went up to keep up with Moore's Law, American businesses sought cheap labour overseas to manufacture and fabricate chips. The company's that did so looked originally to Japan, and the companies that did not, and tried to manufacture in house, died out. Japan began to surpass the US in semiconductor fabrication, due to targeted industrial policy from the Japanese government, and US industrialists cried fowl, and asked for their own government protection, ironically. The US government has always been a big driver of chip development, and agreed readily. In the interest of protecting their profit margins, firms also began to look at alternatives to the Japanese fabrication market, and then began to exploit cheaper markets in South Korea. Through smart government policy, Samsung emerged. Rinse and repat to Taiwan, with TSMC. TSMC was interesting as they were one of the first firms to make microchips to order, that could be customized to suit the needs of whichever company required them. In the era of smart phones and internet of things technology, they currently reign supreme. Now we find ourselves in the modern world. Taiwan has a large market share of chip fabrication on the global market. South Korea and Japan are also up there. China is the next logical step for US companies to exploit cheap labour, but there is a thorny issue of geopolitical competition to consider. China, through its Made in China 2025 initiative, is seeking to manufacture much of its technology domestically. Huawei was its attempt to export domestically built technologies, such as 5G network hardware, overseas, and it was successful for a time. The US and allies are concerned about the security and competitive aspects of such a move, and with many Chinese SOE's funding Huawei and similar companies, this is no surprise and probably warranted.
The issue is the vulnerability that US corporations have built into supply networks. To avoid fair market competition with the Japanese, they have built fabrication supply chains, or supported them, right next door to their biggest geopolitical rival in the modern world. Seems naïve in hindsight, but the reality of the situation is that the US government may not have fully realized how strategic the chip industry was. There was lots of money to be made, for sure, but in the interest of globalization and "move fast, break things" that defined the 2010's foreign policy initiatives in the technological sphere, this made perfect sense. However, the vulnerability becomes clear when China sabre rattles Taiwan. If supply is cut, the US may need to re-shore domestic production and fabrication of chips, and this may take years. The consumer electronics market would be disrupted, and anyone with a smart phone can imagine what may happen to our day to day lives. More immediately concerning is the impact on the US military. With the advent of "intelligization" strategies (building in smart and AI systems to military structures), chips are more important than ever. They are used to guide missiles, sure, but also to build in predictive maintenance routines, to track and disrupt movement of enemy soldiers and VIP's, to disrupt and engage in communications, and so much more. If the ability to supply these systems goes dark, even temporarily, that spells trouble for the US to be able to maintain military capacity.
It is not all doom and gloom for the states however. China suffers from a similar issue. China does not yet have the capability or capacity to develop and manufacture chips domestically, although this gap is becoming increasingly smaller. China may not have to consider the same market forces the US does, but I would argue they probably do at some level, and due to the overly-bureaucratic nature of local investment and venture capital in China, which seemingly stifles innovation, this may prove a challenge. The US suffers a similar issue with innovation in the modern world, in comparison to the industry shaking innovations they tabled in the past. This is because of the monolithic nature of the existing tech firms in the states, moreso than any existing government policy, although I would argue that a lack of policy is technically government policy, and it may have been crafted at some level to be like this. Miller worries about the implications of the vulnerability of semiconductor supply chains, and governments are increasingly waking up to the dangers.
A war in Taiwan may have devastating impacts on global electronics, many of which we rely on heavily in the modern world to gather information, communicate, and operate our daily lives. It is interesting to think about the impacts of this, and how deeply this technology interacts with the operations of daily life. This was a fascinating book, and easily an important one to read in the context of the current situation between the US and China. Quite a timely book, and recommended to those interested in the history of consumer and military semiconductors, and the geopolitics of the electronics industry.
The book follows the development of company's like Texas Instruments, Intel, Samsung, TMSC, Huawei, and more, as the chip industry began to develop. Essentially, the US industry has historically dominated the chip market, but as costs went up to keep up with Moore's Law, American businesses sought cheap labour overseas to manufacture and fabricate chips. The company's that did so looked originally to Japan, and the companies that did not, and tried to manufacture in house, died out. Japan began to surpass the US in semiconductor fabrication, due to targeted industrial policy from the Japanese government, and US industrialists cried fowl, and asked for their own government protection, ironically. The US government has always been a big driver of chip development, and agreed readily. In the interest of protecting their profit margins, firms also began to look at alternatives to the Japanese fabrication market, and then began to exploit cheaper markets in South Korea. Through smart government policy, Samsung emerged. Rinse and repat to Taiwan, with TSMC. TSMC was interesting as they were one of the first firms to make microchips to order, that could be customized to suit the needs of whichever company required them. In the era of smart phones and internet of things technology, they currently reign supreme. Now we find ourselves in the modern world. Taiwan has a large market share of chip fabrication on the global market. South Korea and Japan are also up there. China is the next logical step for US companies to exploit cheap labour, but there is a thorny issue of geopolitical competition to consider. China, through its Made in China 2025 initiative, is seeking to manufacture much of its technology domestically. Huawei was its attempt to export domestically built technologies, such as 5G network hardware, overseas, and it was successful for a time. The US and allies are concerned about the security and competitive aspects of such a move, and with many Chinese SOE's funding Huawei and similar companies, this is no surprise and probably warranted.
The issue is the vulnerability that US corporations have built into supply networks. To avoid fair market competition with the Japanese, they have built fabrication supply chains, or supported them, right next door to their biggest geopolitical rival in the modern world. Seems naïve in hindsight, but the reality of the situation is that the US government may not have fully realized how strategic the chip industry was. There was lots of money to be made, for sure, but in the interest of globalization and "move fast, break things" that defined the 2010's foreign policy initiatives in the technological sphere, this made perfect sense. However, the vulnerability becomes clear when China sabre rattles Taiwan. If supply is cut, the US may need to re-shore domestic production and fabrication of chips, and this may take years. The consumer electronics market would be disrupted, and anyone with a smart phone can imagine what may happen to our day to day lives. More immediately concerning is the impact on the US military. With the advent of "intelligization" strategies (building in smart and AI systems to military structures), chips are more important than ever. They are used to guide missiles, sure, but also to build in predictive maintenance routines, to track and disrupt movement of enemy soldiers and VIP's, to disrupt and engage in communications, and so much more. If the ability to supply these systems goes dark, even temporarily, that spells trouble for the US to be able to maintain military capacity.
It is not all doom and gloom for the states however. China suffers from a similar issue. China does not yet have the capability or capacity to develop and manufacture chips domestically, although this gap is becoming increasingly smaller. China may not have to consider the same market forces the US does, but I would argue they probably do at some level, and due to the overly-bureaucratic nature of local investment and venture capital in China, which seemingly stifles innovation, this may prove a challenge. The US suffers a similar issue with innovation in the modern world, in comparison to the industry shaking innovations they tabled in the past. This is because of the monolithic nature of the existing tech firms in the states, moreso than any existing government policy, although I would argue that a lack of policy is technically government policy, and it may have been crafted at some level to be like this. Miller worries about the implications of the vulnerability of semiconductor supply chains, and governments are increasingly waking up to the dangers.
A war in Taiwan may have devastating impacts on global electronics, many of which we rely on heavily in the modern world to gather information, communicate, and operate our daily lives. It is interesting to think about the impacts of this, and how deeply this technology interacts with the operations of daily life. This was a fascinating book, and easily an important one to read in the context of the current situation between the US and China. Quite a timely book, and recommended to those interested in the history of consumer and military semiconductors, and the geopolitics of the electronics industry.
August 8, 2023
A perfectly competent and often tedious account of the core technology that runs our world. As an electrical engineering student in college I actually find semiconductors really cool on a technological level. My two semiconductor courses (one general, one on photovoltaic cells) were some of my favorite classes that I took. So I found the early chapters that described the invention and manufacturing of the technology really exciting, even though some of those innovations were literally things like union busting.
As you’d expect from a professor from the Tufts Fletcher School of Imperialism and War Crimes, there’s some truly crazy assertions leftover from the last Cold War (how can you say that Jewish Andy Grove had it worse in Soviet-controlled Hungary than when the Nazis were literally committing the Holocaust?) as well as unchallenged assumptions from our new Cold War (Maoism is inherently opposed to semiconductor technology because it isn't “proletarian enough” compared to factories?). The book is also ripe with unaddressed double-standards. Why should we criticize China’s heavy investment in their tech sector when the US did the same thing in the 60s-80s, when the Pentagon shoveled billions into the chip industry for the express purpose of improving missile accuracy? Why should we be alarmed when the Chinese army performs military exercises when the US military’s budget is three times larger, with over 1000 overseas bases, many of them surrounding China?
There’s also a lot of mask-off realism the paints our current conflict in the stark terms that decision makers actually think in. Chief among them is the fact that measures like banning Huawei have nothing to do with actual cybersecurity risk, but rather a calculated move to cripple China’s burgeoning chip industry. The Chinese government decided to take that on the chin instead of escalating. Would the US do the same if the roles were reversed?
Here’s what it all comes down to: infinite growth in technology, exemplified by Moore’s “Law” that the number of semiconductors produced in a single chip has to increase exponentially every few years, has lead to both complex, worldwide, intertwined supply chains, which naturally resulted in monopolies and cartels as capitalism always does, whose international character does not supersede geopolitical rivalries as globalism promised it would; and to an overproduction of electronics without a purpose, necessitating corporations making up bullshit applications like the “Internet of Things” that nobody needs. Within a few decades the American government will bring us into a war with China where millions will die or be displaced, just to ensure that we have computer chips in our toasters and toilets, harvesting our data to sell to advertisers so we can get better personalized Instagram ads.
As you’d expect from a professor from the Tufts Fletcher School of Imperialism and War Crimes, there’s some truly crazy assertions leftover from the last Cold War (how can you say that Jewish Andy Grove had it worse in Soviet-controlled Hungary than when the Nazis were literally committing the Holocaust?) as well as unchallenged assumptions from our new Cold War (Maoism is inherently opposed to semiconductor technology because it isn't “proletarian enough” compared to factories?). The book is also ripe with unaddressed double-standards. Why should we criticize China’s heavy investment in their tech sector when the US did the same thing in the 60s-80s, when the Pentagon shoveled billions into the chip industry for the express purpose of improving missile accuracy? Why should we be alarmed when the Chinese army performs military exercises when the US military’s budget is three times larger, with over 1000 overseas bases, many of them surrounding China?
There’s also a lot of mask-off realism the paints our current conflict in the stark terms that decision makers actually think in. Chief among them is the fact that measures like banning Huawei have nothing to do with actual cybersecurity risk, but rather a calculated move to cripple China’s burgeoning chip industry. The Chinese government decided to take that on the chin instead of escalating. Would the US do the same if the roles were reversed?
Here’s what it all comes down to: infinite growth in technology, exemplified by Moore’s “Law” that the number of semiconductors produced in a single chip has to increase exponentially every few years, has lead to both complex, worldwide, intertwined supply chains, which naturally resulted in monopolies and cartels as capitalism always does, whose international character does not supersede geopolitical rivalries as globalism promised it would; and to an overproduction of electronics without a purpose, necessitating corporations making up bullshit applications like the “Internet of Things” that nobody needs. Within a few decades the American government will bring us into a war with China where millions will die or be displaced, just to ensure that we have computer chips in our toasters and toilets, harvesting our data to sell to advertisers so we can get better personalized Instagram ads.
November 11, 2022
This is a book for people from outside of the domain, there is quite good stuff for them, I would bet they would hear some critical companies first time in their life. Otherwise, it's mostly disappointing by not having enough details more than a Wikipedia page of Intel. It's also full of repetitions and has an unnecessarily non-linear/complex timeline.
May 26, 2023
Great read, got an interesting point of view on few things.
March 10, 2023
ماذا تعرف عن الرقائق الإلكترونية المدمجة؟
لقد ظهر هذا الابتكار قبل ٧٠ عام، كشطحة ابتكارية من عالم أمريكي -وآخر بريطاني لكن لا أحد يحبه-، تبنته شركة أمريكية، تفرعت عنها عدة شركات أمريكية. منها (إنتل) التي نعرفها جيداً.
إن قصة الرقيقة الإلكترونية هي قصة أميركية جداً. ويروي هذا الكتاب العلاقة بين الرجال -ليس بينهم امرأة واحدة- الذين جعلوا من هذه الرقيقة منتجاً استراتيجياً يكاد يوازي النفط أهمية.
وبالرغم من أن التطبيقات الأولى لذلك الاختراع الاميركي كانت عسكرية بدافع من هزيمة ڤيتنام المنكرة، إلا ان ظهور الپي سي غير المعادلة تماماً. صارت الشريحة مطلباً شعبياً كثيف الإنتاج، لأجل اللابتوب، ولأجل الكاميرا الديجيتال، والسيارات والغسالات والساعات الحديثة. كل جيل من الرقائق أعقد تصميماً ويحوي ضعف عدد الترانزستورات. ثم لما ظهرت الهواتف الذكية، زاطت الأمور تماماً!
في خضم ذلك كله، وخلال العقود السبعة الماضية حصلت عدة تطورات:
١- خرجت الأمور عن السيطرة الاميركية. دخل اليابانيون والكوريون والتايوانيون وشركة واحدة هولندية على الخط وصاروا لاعبين مؤثرين. هؤلاء هم من يتحكمون بحياتنا التقنية اليوم وبدونهم فلن يظهر الجيل التالي من الآيفون.
٢- الأمريكيون غير سعداء بهذا الاعتماد على الآخرين وإن كانوا "حلفاء"، لأن الإلكترونيات تظل مكوناً أساسياً في المنتجات العسكرية من الدرونات الموجهة حتى نفاثات الجيل الخامس.
٣- دخلت الصين اللعبة قبل ٣٠ عام. هي ما تزال متأخرة عن أمريكا، لكنها لن تكل أو تمل حتى تسيطر على السوق، وهذا باب توتر كبير بينها وبين الأميركان والتايوانيين والكوريين واليابانيين.
كتاب لطيف عن التقنية والسياسة والعلاقة بينهما. قد يكون حافلاً بالتفاصيل التقنية لكنني استمتعت به لأني درست هندسة الحاسبات في الجامعة 😊.
لقد ظهر هذا الابتكار قبل ٧٠ عام، كشطحة ابتكارية من عالم أمريكي -وآخر بريطاني لكن لا أحد يحبه-، تبنته شركة أمريكية، تفرعت عنها عدة شركات أمريكية. منها (إنتل) التي نعرفها جيداً.
إن قصة الرقيقة الإلكترونية هي قصة أميركية جداً. ويروي هذا الكتاب العلاقة بين الرجال -ليس بينهم امرأة واحدة- الذين جعلوا من هذه الرقيقة منتجاً استراتيجياً يكاد يوازي النفط أهمية.
وبالرغم من أن التطبيقات الأولى لذلك الاختراع الاميركي كانت عسكرية بدافع من هزيمة ڤيتنام المنكرة، إلا ان ظهور الپي سي غير المعادلة تماماً. صارت الشريحة مطلباً شعبياً كثيف الإنتاج، لأجل اللابتوب، ولأجل الكاميرا الديجيتال، والسيارات والغسالات والساعات الحديثة. كل جيل من الرقائق أعقد تصميماً ويحوي ضعف عدد الترانزستورات. ثم لما ظهرت الهواتف الذكية، زاطت الأمور تماماً!
في خضم ذلك كله، وخلال العقود السبعة الماضية حصلت عدة تطورات:
١- خرجت الأمور عن السيطرة الاميركية. دخل اليابانيون والكوريون والتايوانيون وشركة واحدة هولندية على الخط وصاروا لاعبين مؤثرين. هؤلاء هم من يتحكمون بحياتنا التقنية اليوم وبدونهم فلن يظهر الجيل التالي من الآيفون.
٢- الأمريكيون غير سعداء بهذا الاعتماد على الآخرين وإن كانوا "حلفاء"، لأن الإلكترونيات تظل مكوناً أساسياً في المنتجات العسكرية من الدرونات الموجهة حتى نفاثات الجيل الخامس.
٣- دخلت الصين اللعبة قبل ٣٠ عام. هي ما تزال متأخرة عن أمريكا، لكنها لن تكل أو تمل حتى تسيطر على السوق، وهذا باب توتر كبير بينها وبين الأميركان والتايوانيين والكوريين واليابانيين.
كتاب لطيف عن التقنية والسياسة والعلاقة بينهما. قد يكون حافلاً بالتفاصيل التقنية لكنني استمتعت به لأني درست هندسة الحاسبات في الجامعة 😊.
July 25, 2024
You won’t believe how fragile the world’s supply chain is for technology products!
I can't understand how I thought I comprehended the global geopolitical context without having read this book, is a must-read for anyone who wants to grasp the current dynamics between superpowers and the potential impact of their actions. Chris Miller has written an extraordinary work that deserves a five-star rating for its clarity, depth, and relevance.
Is an essential read to understand the current geopolitical landscape. The book offers a deep insight into the structural differences between China and the United States in terms of business and military defense, highlighting the growing tensions around Taiwan.
Miller addresses the Taiwan conflict with seriousness, emphasizing the strategic importance of the island due to its control over chip manufacturing and the established tech companies there. The possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not only be a global turning point but also have profound implications for the global tech industry, given the advanced capabilities and multi-billion-dollar investments and years required to set up chip factories.
For Mexico and Latin America, provides valuable lessons on economic development. In my view, the region should not focus on large technological investments due to the significant gap with the players already dominating the chip industry. Instead of trying to compete directly in these areas, we should focus on utilizing existing technologies and leveraging competitive specific areas such as tourism and the internal market.
What makes this book extraordinary is its structure of short, "snackable" chapters that are quickly read, maintaining the reader's interest while providing a clear and profound understanding of why countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, “Japan” and obviously the US have thrived by focusing on technology. Additionally, it highlights the difficulty of competing in the microchip industry, where the barriers to entry are extremely high due to costs and technologies protected by the governments of the United States and its allies.
I can't understand how I thought I comprehended the global geopolitical context without having read this book, is a must-read for anyone who wants to grasp the current dynamics between superpowers and the potential impact of their actions. Chris Miller has written an extraordinary work that deserves a five-star rating for its clarity, depth, and relevance.
Is an essential read to understand the current geopolitical landscape. The book offers a deep insight into the structural differences between China and the United States in terms of business and military defense, highlighting the growing tensions around Taiwan.
Miller addresses the Taiwan conflict with seriousness, emphasizing the strategic importance of the island due to its control over chip manufacturing and the established tech companies there. The possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not only be a global turning point but also have profound implications for the global tech industry, given the advanced capabilities and multi-billion-dollar investments and years required to set up chip factories.
For Mexico and Latin America, provides valuable lessons on economic development. In my view, the region should not focus on large technological investments due to the significant gap with the players already dominating the chip industry. Instead of trying to compete directly in these areas, we should focus on utilizing existing technologies and leveraging competitive specific areas such as tourism and the internal market.
What makes this book extraordinary is its structure of short, "snackable" chapters that are quickly read, maintaining the reader's interest while providing a clear and profound understanding of why countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, “Japan” and obviously the US have thrived by focusing on technology. Additionally, it highlights the difficulty of competing in the microchip industry, where the barriers to entry are extremely high due to costs and technologies protected by the governments of the United States and its allies.
March 4, 2023
Sensational book about the history of the chip industry and the current technological and trade conflict between the US and China. The book traces the history of the chip all the way from the 1940s with its pioneers hailing from China, Japan, Korea and the US.
It explains how the US became a global tech super-power from the 1950s to the 1970s with tech companies such as Texas Instruments, Fairchild Computing or Intel, how they transferred their knowledge and know-how to their Asian allies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, how they were challenged by Japan in the 1980s, how they created a symbiotic relationship with Taiwan in the 1990s and how they are once again challenged today by China today.
Other than the impressive pace of innovation the book explains how the key to the modern chip production is the fabless model. In this model US companies designs microchips but contract out their production to factories in Asia. This is what led to the current bottleneck where pretty much the whole world is dependent on a single company in Taiwan (TSMC that produces the chips) and a single company in Netherlands (ASML that produces the photolitography machines that are actually used to produce the chips).
One of the best books I have read a in recent times, 5 out of 5. It is the perfect primer to understand the chip industry, its history and also today's landscape.
It explains how the US became a global tech super-power from the 1950s to the 1970s with tech companies such as Texas Instruments, Fairchild Computing or Intel, how they transferred their knowledge and know-how to their Asian allies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, how they were challenged by Japan in the 1980s, how they created a symbiotic relationship with Taiwan in the 1990s and how they are once again challenged today by China today.
Other than the impressive pace of innovation the book explains how the key to the modern chip production is the fabless model. In this model US companies designs microchips but contract out their production to factories in Asia. This is what led to the current bottleneck where pretty much the whole world is dependent on a single company in Taiwan (TSMC that produces the chips) and a single company in Netherlands (ASML that produces the photolitography machines that are actually used to produce the chips).
One of the best books I have read a in recent times, 5 out of 5. It is the perfect primer to understand the chip industry, its history and also today's landscape.
January 29, 2024
What a well-written, well-researched and gripping book! It captures my attention from the first page, leads me through the history of the semiconductor industry and the evolution of the technology, and provides me with understanding of various players in the field and the related geopolitics.
The semiconductors (chips) are the new oil. It’s surprising how many choke points exist in such a key industry to our global economy.
The overall tone is neutral and professional. I can not agree more on the Taiwan Dilemma. No one knows what will happen next. Should the war break out, nobody will benefit from it, but this fact won’t stop certain players from trying.
Highly recommended.
The semiconductors (chips) are the new oil. It’s surprising how many choke points exist in such a key industry to our global economy.
The overall tone is neutral and professional. I can not agree more on the Taiwan Dilemma. No one knows what will happen next. Should the war break out, nobody will benefit from it, but this fact won’t stop certain players from trying.
Highly recommended.
March 21, 2024
Having worked as a circuit designer for over 7 years, this book was super exciting for me! It gave me a very different perspective of whole industry and its significance on the world stage, its place in the history and future. Day-to-day life as an electronics engineer doesn’t seem to be as dramatic or impactful as to the aggregative story of all such innovators over decades. It was pretty cool to realise that I have worked with both the pioneering companies of this technology, and to connect the dots about certain product development plans and certain decisions from leadership teams, which didn’t make much sense before without this much broader overview presented in the book.
The story of all these disruptive & unparalleled tech giants and their visionaries is truly inspiring. Also, the role of politics, geography & military in the development of semicon industry was something that blew my mind! A good idea is not enough - it has to be supported by a number of other factors, which have nothing to do with engineering, to make its success feasible. Another amazing thing was how well the author demonstrated the inter-dependence and complexity that goes into creating a chip. I have been part of only the design cycle which involves creating the product concept, designing circuits and sending the chip for manufacturing which itself is a tedious and meticulous process but the fact remains that this is just one part of a big web that is involved in actually getting a usable product in consumer’s hand.
Although the book felt repetitive sometimes, the facts & ideas remain entertaining enough. Overall, great read. Definitely recommended!
The story of all these disruptive & unparalleled tech giants and their visionaries is truly inspiring. Also, the role of politics, geography & military in the development of semicon industry was something that blew my mind! A good idea is not enough - it has to be supported by a number of other factors, which have nothing to do with engineering, to make its success feasible. Another amazing thing was how well the author demonstrated the inter-dependence and complexity that goes into creating a chip. I have been part of only the design cycle which involves creating the product concept, designing circuits and sending the chip for manufacturing which itself is a tedious and meticulous process but the fact remains that this is just one part of a big web that is involved in actually getting a usable product in consumer’s hand.
Although the book felt repetitive sometimes, the facts & ideas remain entertaining enough. Overall, great read. Definitely recommended!
July 2, 2024
This book reminded me that gaming habits are heavily linked with world politics and economics. A detailed history of the microprocessor and hardware industry in general, it takes us from the early days of the Silicon Valley to the current US China-moderate rivalry. Chips of course became newsworthy since the famous Huawei ban and the pandemic shortages, but the whole story is much more interesting.
I liked how Chris Miller balanced history and present concerns. His prose is vivid, and the narrative is solid. The author managed to combine different dimensions in a fluent retelling, so the work presents a multifaceted world. The main defect is that Chip War represent a lengthy history with many minutiae, and the reader must be prepared.
Two ideas to retain. While chips are fundamental for national security, it is not the governments who are producing the most innovative ideas and the future technology is difficult to predict. Nvidia’s jump into the AI business or the constant difficulties which Intel has in remaining competitive are only a few examples. But governments are important in setting up the general policy, investing in education and offering security, which the tension around Taiwan aptly illustrates.
The industry is heavily globalized, and this interdependence will not go away. But it is not the free-market ideal. It is a globalization defined by powerful states, transnational inequalities and chokepoints which can be used to press the advantage. It is more the world of Robert Gilpin, Susan Strange or of a cyberpunk novel like Neuromancer, than the world imagined by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
While reading this book, I checked where my PC`s components are made and found out that my CPU is 7nm designed by AMD with an extra cache, and made by TSMC, while the GPU is produced by ZOTAC/PC Partner, a company from Hong Kong and assembled in China mainland, by using an Nvidia design and 8nm chips.
I liked how Chris Miller balanced history and present concerns. His prose is vivid, and the narrative is solid. The author managed to combine different dimensions in a fluent retelling, so the work presents a multifaceted world. The main defect is that Chip War represent a lengthy history with many minutiae, and the reader must be prepared.
Two ideas to retain. While chips are fundamental for national security, it is not the governments who are producing the most innovative ideas and the future technology is difficult to predict. Nvidia’s jump into the AI business or the constant difficulties which Intel has in remaining competitive are only a few examples. But governments are important in setting up the general policy, investing in education and offering security, which the tension around Taiwan aptly illustrates.
The industry is heavily globalized, and this interdependence will not go away. But it is not the free-market ideal. It is a globalization defined by powerful states, transnational inequalities and chokepoints which can be used to press the advantage. It is more the world of Robert Gilpin, Susan Strange or of a cyberpunk novel like Neuromancer, than the world imagined by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
While reading this book, I checked where my PC`s components are made and found out that my CPU is 7nm designed by AMD with an extra cache, and made by TSMC, while the GPU is produced by ZOTAC/PC Partner, a company from Hong Kong and assembled in China mainland, by using an Nvidia design and 8nm chips.
Read
November 8, 202320023-11-08 I finished this last week. Hoping to pull my notes/highlights together soon to write a decent review.
2023-10-26 Started this about a week ago - very captivating. The author is a very good writer. The subject is of great interest to me, since I followed the progress of the microprocessor firms, their products and the overall market pretty closely in publications ranging from: PC Magazine, "InfoWorld" "PC News, to Forbes, ASAP, Wall St. Journal and others from the early 80s till the early 2000s. PLUS, I actually lived in Silicon Valley (San Jose) from 1995-2021, and worked and interacted with a fair number of high-tech firms (some chip designers included) and friends and associates during most of that time.
The author has so far done a great job on many of the topics, explaining them quite clearly, despite some of them being pretty technical and/or controversial.
However, some of the topics, as well at the title and major theme of the book is a very big problem.
The use of the term "war" as an analogy to real war, where people are shot, blown-up, taken hostage, captured, maimed, etc. for business practices, is a very bad one. It leads people to misconstrue what is really going on and blurs the very real lines of difference. Sure, it may sell extra books... but is that a good-enough reason? Not in my value system.
Since I am only about 2/3 through the book, I plan to come back to add more to this review when I do finish, and then have time to sort through my notes and highlights, of which I have already made very many. Just this morning, I started "sharing" some of my notes/highlights on Goodreads, so perhaps you have seen some already.
2023-10-26 Started this about a week ago - very captivating. The author is a very good writer. The subject is of great interest to me, since I followed the progress of the microprocessor firms, their products and the overall market pretty closely in publications ranging from: PC Magazine, "InfoWorld" "PC News, to Forbes, ASAP, Wall St. Journal and others from the early 80s till the early 2000s. PLUS, I actually lived in Silicon Valley (San Jose) from 1995-2021, and worked and interacted with a fair number of high-tech firms (some chip designers included) and friends and associates during most of that time.
The author has so far done a great job on many of the topics, explaining them quite clearly, despite some of them being pretty technical and/or controversial.
However, some of the topics, as well at the title and major theme of the book is a very big problem.
The use of the term "war" as an analogy to real war, where people are shot, blown-up, taken hostage, captured, maimed, etc. for business practices, is a very bad one. It leads people to misconstrue what is really going on and blurs the very real lines of difference. Sure, it may sell extra books... but is that a good-enough reason? Not in my value system.
Since I am only about 2/3 through the book, I plan to come back to add more to this review when I do finish, and then have time to sort through my notes and highlights, of which I have already made very many. Just this morning, I started "sharing" some of my notes/highlights on Goodreads, so perhaps you have seen some already.
November 20, 2022
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
-- Andy Grove
Chip War is a marvelous history book about the semiconductor industry from the USA's point of view. As someone who works with information technology, I was somewhat familiar with the main twists and turns, but I still found the text illuminating and fun to consume. I can easily recommend the book to anyone who's even a little bit interested in the topic!
-- Andy Grove
Chip War is a marvelous history book about the semiconductor industry from the USA's point of view. As someone who works with information technology, I was somewhat familiar with the main twists and turns, but I still found the text illuminating and fun to consume. I can easily recommend the book to anyone who's even a little bit interested in the topic!
August 31, 2023
Best book I've read this year.
Smooth and concise story line all the way from historical backstory on semiconductors coming about, to the geopolitical implications of chip manufacturing from US-China standoff in Taiwan to Russia's military troubles after attacking Ukraine.
Smooth and concise story line all the way from historical backstory on semiconductors coming about, to the geopolitical implications of chip manufacturing from US-China standoff in Taiwan to Russia's military troubles after attacking Ukraine.
June 19, 2023
A lot of narrative, story-telling, and ideology. Very weak in actual content and arguments. Also the author has zero knowledge about the science of chips and semiconductors. He learned everything about international politics by reading the New York Times. This book reads like a history essay written by a high school kid, carelessly copying and pasting from ChatGPT. Reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens"- such books try to tackle ambitious topics with a severe lack of expertise, and of course they fail miserably. Such ambitious but shallow books are often good candidates for making the "New York Times Bestseller" list.
January 2, 2023
Outstanding !
First 40% of this book is literally the history of the microchip, starting with the first transistor in late 50's designed by Shockley, then mass produced in emerging companies like Texas Instruments and Fairchild initially for the Pentagon's guided missles used in Vietnam war then for general use.
We then hit the 60-70's when America outsources its production to Japan and loses its grip on memory chip DRAM technology.
3 engineers leave Fairchild and create Intel.
In the 80's Intel loses market share to Japan which learned to integrate chips in consumer electronics (radios , walkman) via companies like Sony and Sharp.
Late 80's Intel gambles and leaves DRAM market and together with IBM and Bill Gates MSFT devise an alliance around IBM computers , running Windows OS , powered by Intel's x86 microchip architecture. This will dominate the next 30 years.
We also get to see how the smartphone arena changed the balance of pwoer from USA to Taiwan and how Intel refused to produce custom chips for the emerging Apple , thus throwing away a huge opportunity for divestment.
We get to understand the different types of chips (memory , logic and analog) and who specializes in what as well as the complex procedures required to.build a chip (design, production and assembly) and learn why everything now is centered around Taiwan's TSMC behemoth.
The transistor lessons are above par , as well as the complex machinery needed to build it nowadays via the process of litography , and why only Netherlands's ASML can do it (using no less then 460k parts ) including high precision lasers from Germany's Trumpf which in turn uses Carl Zeiss optics.
There are so many things explained regarding transistors , cpu's , memory , supply chains , the companies that design ,produce and consume (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Micron , Huawei , Samsung , Apple) , world gonverments, USA trade war with China and the banning of Huawei....
This book is literally a compact enciclopedia involving topics such as history , electronics , science , politics , warfare and everything that has to do with microchips which is the new world's gold standard.
Besides developers , and electronic nerds, people into tech and not only will find this book mind blowing !
First 40% of this book is literally the history of the microchip, starting with the first transistor in late 50's designed by Shockley, then mass produced in emerging companies like Texas Instruments and Fairchild initially for the Pentagon's guided missles used in Vietnam war then for general use.
We then hit the 60-70's when America outsources its production to Japan and loses its grip on memory chip DRAM technology.
3 engineers leave Fairchild and create Intel.
In the 80's Intel loses market share to Japan which learned to integrate chips in consumer electronics (radios , walkman) via companies like Sony and Sharp.
Late 80's Intel gambles and leaves DRAM market and together with IBM and Bill Gates MSFT devise an alliance around IBM computers , running Windows OS , powered by Intel's x86 microchip architecture. This will dominate the next 30 years.
We also get to see how the smartphone arena changed the balance of pwoer from USA to Taiwan and how Intel refused to produce custom chips for the emerging Apple , thus throwing away a huge opportunity for divestment.
We get to understand the different types of chips (memory , logic and analog) and who specializes in what as well as the complex procedures required to.build a chip (design, production and assembly) and learn why everything now is centered around Taiwan's TSMC behemoth.
The transistor lessons are above par , as well as the complex machinery needed to build it nowadays via the process of litography , and why only Netherlands's ASML can do it (using no less then 460k parts ) including high precision lasers from Germany's Trumpf which in turn uses Carl Zeiss optics.
There are so many things explained regarding transistors , cpu's , memory , supply chains , the companies that design ,produce and consume (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Micron , Huawei , Samsung , Apple) , world gonverments, USA trade war with China and the banning of Huawei....
This book is literally a compact enciclopedia involving topics such as history , electronics , science , politics , warfare and everything that has to do with microchips which is the new world's gold standard.
Besides developers , and electronic nerds, people into tech and not only will find this book mind blowing !
November 30, 2023
This was a recent pick for our book club. It was an eye opener for me, in that I knew next to nothing about chip technology, and how many of the devices I currently use wouldn't be possible without chips. This book outlines the history of chip development and how important it is for global economies. Worth reading.
November 26, 2022
Quite good.
It can be hard to evaluate these books. But the parts that lapsed into areas I have a better understanding of seem to ring true. Learned quite a bit, and definitely have a deeper appreciation of the industry.
It can be hard to evaluate these books. But the parts that lapsed into areas I have a better understanding of seem to ring true. Learned quite a bit, and definitely have a deeper appreciation of the industry.
December 4, 2022
Puiki ir kontekstuali. Aišku, verslo istorijų vystymasis yra mano silpnybė, bet šita puikiai sudėliota nuo "adomo ir ievos" ir sujungti geopolitiniai įvykiai, politika ir verslo sprendimai: nuo pat XX a. amžiaus vidurio, kai procesoriai atsirado iki pat pandemijos ir karo prieš Ukrainą.
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