- There is only one factory in the world that can fabricate Apple’s newest processors
- It all comes down to making switches
- Semiconductors work by limiting electron flow when no field is applied
- “Chips” are chipped off a large wafer
- Early chips focused on meeting military needs but took off as prices dropped
- Sony had a vision for the use of chips
- Japan had a vision for what was possible with the new chips
- The French scoffed at the Japanese as “transistor salesmen”
- “The best weapons are cheap and familiar.”
- Intel started with a generalized DRAM which helped them for the world with cheap, effective chips
- The military started Silicone Valley but consumers sustained it
- The Japanese became known for superior implementation
- Japanese conglomerates were able to leverage their breadth into cheap loans
- US firms lobbied hard to get congress to subsidize their research
- Simplot (of potato fame) jumped into the memory market as it become a commodity
- Pivoting chip design from a manual, fabrication-centric process to a systematic one, was important to designing with speed
- The USSR struggled to design and manufacture chips
- Even when they could, they did not have the US’s global network for mass production
- Taiwan crafted an industry of printing anyone’s chips, without fear of competition
- China “woke up” and started changing from “1st machine imported, 2nd machine imported, 3rd machine imported” to “1st machine imported, 2nd machine China built, 3rd machine exported”
- ASML started growing by investing in new lithography technologies
- Intel fostered extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) but did not want to get into fabrication itself
- Intel saw mobile devices coming but refused to explore it because the PC business was too good
- (Being worried about margin seems ridiculous. Instead, growing new businesses is best when the margins are good.)
- Graphics helped fabless solutions succeed
- Nvidia developed free software that allowed generalized compute on their chips
- Qualcomm and Nvidia really benefited from fabless solutions too
- ASML flexed its Supply Chain Management skills as much as R&D skills
- EUV is so precise that new techniques were needed, you so not just imprint the pattern
- Intel did not adopt EUV as quickly as others, leaving them mostly out of the market by the time they picked it up
- Beam forming directs radio signals only towards your phone helping improve signals in a crowded space
- Military efforts are leaning ever more into tech
- The US tried to just “run faster” but that was not adequate for the China strategy
- Building a single-country chip supply chain is impractical given the level of technical skill it requires
- The post-COVID chip shortage was not about capacity (we produced more chips than ever) but that previous chip orders were cancelled, losing their “spot” in the production line
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.