Summary of Chip War By Chris Miller: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Chip War By Chris Miller: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

 

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Chip War is an epic account of the decades-long battle for what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology. Author Chris Miller explores how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. became dominant in chip design and manufacturing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Dec 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215572306

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

On board the USS Mustin, a row of sailors sat in a dark room in front of an array of displays showing data from planes, drones, ships, and satellites tracking movement across the Indo-Pacific. China's leaders worried less about the U.S. Navy and more about an obscure Commerce Department regulation limiting the transfer of American technology abroad. The United States barred Huawei from buying computer chips made with U.S. technology, and the Chinese company's global expansion ground to a halt. China is devoting its best minds to developing its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America's chip choke.

As the USS Mustin sailed southward, factories and assembly facilities on both sides of the Strait were churning out components for the iPhone 12. Around a quarter of the chip industry's revenue comes from phones; much of the price of a new phone pays for the semiconductors inside. TSMC's most advanced facility, Fab 18, was carving microscopic mazes of tiny transistors. Last year, the chip industry produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies. In 1960, Fairchild cofounder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of components that could be fit on each chip was doubling annually.

Moore's Law: The cost of computing has fallen by a billionfold in the past half century. Semiconductors spread across society because companies devised new techniques to manufacture them. Almost every chip made today still has a Silicon Valley connection or was designed and built in California. Today, semiconductors are embedded in every device that requires computing power, and in the age of the Internet of Things, this means pretty much every device. America's chip firms have built supply chains that stretch across the world, driving down costs and producing expertise that has made Moore's Law possible.

Semiconductor supply chains are complex and horrendously expensive. Unlike oil, our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points. If any one of the steps in the production process is interrupted, the world's supply of new computing power is imperiled. Taiwan is the epicenter of world semiconductor manufacturing. A devastating quake could also hit Japan or Silicon Valley.

The interconnections between the chip industries in the U.S., China, and Taiwan are dizzyingly complex. It wouldn't take anything as dramatic as an amphibious assault to send semiconductor shock waves careening. A single missile strike on TSMC's most advanced chip fabrication facility could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. The book contends that semiconductors have defined the world we live in. Its development has been shaped by corporations and consumers as well as governments and the imperatives of war.

PART I

COLD WAR CHIPS

From Steel to Silicon

Akio Morita's brothers were being trained as kamikaze pilots when World War II ended. Andy Grove lived through multiple invasions of Budapest; his father fought alongside Hungary's Nazi allies against the Soviet Union. Morris Chang spent his teenage years fleeing the Japanese armies that swept across China. World War II's outcome was determined by industrial output, but new technologies were transforming military power. The United States built more tanks than all the Axis powers combined.

Convoys of industrial goods streamed from American ports across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. America's Kaiser shipyards and assembly lines produced fighting power. During the Great Depression, America's Works Progress Administration set up the Mathematical Tables Project to employ jobless office workers. Computers could tabulate payrolls, track sales, collect census results, sift through the data on fires and droughts needed to price insurance policies. World War II accelerated the hunt for computing power.