Chip War - Chris Miller
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- Tags: #reading #reading-2025 #history #semicon
Interesting read, from an uber-american perspective.
It starts with the history of the initial champions of the industry, fueled mostly by the american military apparatus. Some, however, could see there would be a path forward in consumer applications, which would lead to a much larger market and hence it would become a game of volume rather than specialization.
It is interesting to see the relationship between the US and Japan unfold around semicon. There are interests at play, such as keeping the soviets and the chinese away and building closer ties. However, the Japanse got the chance of becoming much better than the americans at making DRAM chips, completely wiping the industry.
Early companies such as Fairchild, understood the advantage of outsourcing to cheaper places, particularly in Asia. That would allow them to compete in the race for volume and low costs. "Asians were desperate to get out of farm jobs".
At some point, the military superiority that chips allowed to have (for example in Vietnam), lead the Soviet Union to create a race to parity. The model they started was of simply copying what was being done in Silicon Valley. However, copying "know-how" is not as straight forward as one may expect. This leads to always being at least 5 years behind. According to the book, at least, there was never a chance for the Soviets to catch up.
I liked reading about Micron (a company with which I've been in contact but of which I knew nothing). It was started by a very wealthy potato farmer. "Potato chips or silicon chips are the same". He understood the value of efficiency in a context of commoditize systems. He managed to pull through with the memory business that was in the hands of the Japanese, out performing their systems.
Interestingly, the history repeats with China. Although early communist leaders didn't see science and technology as the path forward, this changed in the 90's. Specifically with semicon, understanding the strategic and military importance, a swath of money from the government flew into companies working with chips.
Sure, not all of them worked, but some like Huawei really took off, managing to capture the entire market of communications (specifically of 5G). Manufacturing was still done in Taiwan, but the design was done in China.
The last part of the book gives a very militaristic approach to the next few years/decades. It shows the power of the US when it says that even ASML depends on a company that makes lasers and is based there.
The country strong-armed Huawei to the point of leaving it out of competition for the 5G connections. Semicon is so globalized, that there are many choke points along the way, and the US knows how to squeeze them.
The author even goes one step further, discussing how an invasion of Taiwan would look like. I must admit, the name "Chip War" should have hinted a bit more into what I was going to read. I just hoped it would focus on the future of the technology, opportunities, etc. Not on how to build an army to prevent China from taking over Taiwan, or how the US is so good at everything that will take back manufacturing from the Koreans (thanks to Intel, no less).
It is a nice historical perspective of an industry with immense global relevance. But from such an americanize perspective that is nauseating at times.
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