Chris Miller (12)Critiques

Enlightening books. It tells the story of ubiquitous technology. Very well researched. It covers the whole spectrum. History of the chips how, when and where they were invented. And, what role these tiny chips play in world's geopolitics. Very well written.

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istened to this on audio, at the recommendation of Oberon. This was an excellent read. Miller goes thru the history of the semi-conductor industry from the start when Silcon Valley wasn't a thing and Gordon Moore was just coming up with his "law". To the evitable off-shoring of manufacturing (which happened much earlier than I suspected) to the current economic and national security battles that are ongoing with China and the US and where the much needed chips that drive our society need/can be made. Its the new Cold War. Excellent read.

There's a lot going on in this book. It covers history, technology, engineering, economics, business strategies, government, and international relations over more than seventy years. The audience for each of these often has little interest in the others. As such, it has taken on more than most books. It's heaviest on history but chips are in the headlines even today as I write this. Reading this book will help anyone understand why The Chips Act had bipartisan support and is one of President Biden's most prominent accomplishments. The news coverage is full of ground-breaking announcements in several states, especially the battleground states of the 2024 election. There's one important downside here. This field is moving so fast this book is already out of date, even though it was published in 2022. It does discuss GPUs, NVIDIA, and even artificial intelligence, but it never mentions ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Large Language Models. While these are all software, they are altering the chip world, and war, dramatically.

The most important thing I realized reading this book is the importance of the difference between designing chips and manufacturing them at scale. I knew there was a difference, but I did not appreciate both how dramatic and how important the difference is. While the United States has been the king of chips, other countries, especially China, are ready to challenge that leadership. And it’s the difference between design and manufacturing, or as they refer to it, fabricating, that's at the heart of that challenge. The U.S. dominates the design side of chips. That has captured the world's attention. What has been obvious to many is designing is just one side of the story. Other countries dominate the fabrication side, most notably Taiwan and China. The U.S. now sees this as a strategic vulnerability and is taking steps to correct that situation. The Chips Act subsidizes companies that choose to build chip manufacturing facilities in the United States. That's state subsidization, a long time no-no of free trade which has long dominated U.S. trade policy. But the downsides of what free trade has wrought in the world of chips are no longer acceptable. While the U.S. is playing catchup, there are significant headwinds which will delay this process.

This book is an excellent source to understand the headwinds. And there are several. Just looking at the present makes it obvious that change will require upsetting an applecart that is working exceedingly well for several big players. Some will argue that change will likely disturb partners that have worked well together so far and indeed have contracts that bind them for some time into the future. U.S. companies need to rely on their foreign partners to deliver on promises they've already made, so the present works against change for the future. Another headwind is the fact that chips can never be totaled divorced from the products they are used in. While chips are everywhere, the two the most important are electronic devices, such as computers and cell phones, and cars and trucks, both today's gas versions and tomorrow’s electric versions. Almost all are either manufactured or assembled outside the U.S. Think Apple products assembled in China and many Tesla's. While chips are small, if they are fabricated where they will be used, costs will be lower. Supply chains understand that logic. Another headwind is time. It takes a significant amount of time to both design and build at scale. Changing gears will involve significant time delays. Existing players enjoy significant lead having spent years developing their position. Along with time is money. A significant barrier to entry, as well as a high likelihood of failure, is the significant startup cost. Table stakes are exorbitant. There's also unpredictability. What will tomorrow bring? It makes it harder to convince others of your vision. And then there's the difficulty of speed. Making chips faster normally involves making things smaller. We've reached a point where the engineering required to make things smaller is reaching atomic limits. Only one firm in the world, a Dutch firm, ASML, is currently capable of building the machines that can create the chips at the atomic level required. There's no competition. Their machines are huge, very expensive, and take a long time to build. This roadblock sits across all development in this area. Major headwind.

Fortunately, there are still people who are ready to join the fray. Most of the activity is at the design stage. While today NVIDIA dominates the GPUs needed for the enormous needs of artificial intelligence software, several others are working on alternatives including Google, Apple, Intel, and AMD. Development on the design side is funded by these huge corporations. Intel has long dominated the workstation and server market with its famous slogan and logo, "Intel inside". Intel has a long-term problem. It's relatively unique as it has both designed and fabricated chips. It has also played both sides by having installations in both the U.S. and overseas. But their fabrication machines are oriented toward the older x86 design, which is less demanding on tolerance. The chips of the future require much higher tolerance to achieve the denser packing needed to create faster and smaller chips. The old machines can't compete. Intel has to build new factories with new machines. A costly and time-consuming process. AMD has reverse engineered the x86 Intel chips and has taken market share from Intel. They've spun off their fabrication facilities. That should allow them to focus on design. Apple eventually abandoned Motorola for Intel, but more recently is designing their own chips for their computers and cell phones. The fabrication side is different. There is one major player that dominates that market, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC. It fabricates chips but is even better known for assembling consumer electronics for Apple and others. More recently, the major news is that TSMC fabricates the GPUs designed by NVIDIA. TSMC is based in Taiwan but has major installations in China, India, and Vietnam. TSMC and Intel are taken advantage of the Chips Act and are building plants to fabricate chips in the US.

While this book follows major trends, there are several people, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk that are barely mentioned – Gates and Musk mentioned on one page, Bezos, never. Yes, their focus was elsewhere, so this may make sense. My guess is they were players in the chip world as well.

I can’t think of a more relevant book to charting the future of Sino-US relations for the coming 20-30 years.

Also, if you ever doubted government’s subservience to multi-national tech firms before, after reading this book you will understand that tech really rules the roost. The firms that make our computer chips have more money to invest and bigger markets than you could dream of.

How they got this way us the subject of this book.

Defense, communications, health, commerce today are now wedded to these extraordinary inventions.

We owe their success in a large part to scientific breakthroughs, but also to engineering, logistics, and savvy marketing innovations as well. And one of the industries biggest innovators was a quality control guy with a laser focus on process.

Engaging read about some very smart people and the semis market. Really cool how important this industry has become worldwide. Look to see this be a hot spot area for years to come.½

This is a clearly written, deeply researched entirely fascinating history of the semiconductor silicon industry, telling of our complete dependence on it for many electrical devices without which modern life would be unimaginable and indeed impossible. That dependence is made worse by the fact that the key manufacturer for the vast majority of semiconductor chips is TSMC in Taiwan, perilously placed in relation to China. And the desire of the US to prevent China from gaining the ascendancy in terms of chip development is one of the most compelling aspects of the book - not just its desire to ensure TSMC remains accessible but to increase domestic manufacture (not at all a straightforward process) but also to prevent access to China of the incredibly complicated and expensive equipment used to design and fabricate chips which is solely made by a Dutch company, ASML (and which is a very significant contributor to the Dutch economy). Anyway - hugely informative and topical.

Really incredible and fascinating book. I loved learning about the history of the development of chips. While I thought I didn't like non-fiction, this changed my mind. The way it is written is really engaging and I never felt like I was being bored with history. Makes me want to become a semiconductor engineer. I found it so interesting how much intersection there is between engineering and politics. Its cool to see people theorize implications of technology that doesn't even exist yet, but predict will exist and then prepare for it like Qualcomm packing more data into radiowaves. Overall really fantastic book, would definitely recommend it to anyone!

A massive, movers-and-shakers-oriented history of semiconductor integrated circuits (memory modules and microprocessors), from the post-war invention of the transistor to the inter-country struggles of the present day. Stages covered include the beginning of Silicon Valley; the period of Japanese dominance; the US resurgence of the 1990s with the help of cheap-labor South Korea and the shift of emphasis to microprocessors; the rise of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Intel's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography for chip making; the separation of chip design from fabrication, which was often outsourced/offshored to TSMC and others; the rise of GPU (graphics processing unit) chips, such as Nvidia's, and their role in AI and machine learning; China's recent efforts to catch up -- Huawei, 5G, and so on; military implications of it all and how very disastrous for the world a Chinese war on Taiwan could be. Whew.

I've enjoyed this book A LOT. It's been truly revealing to discover how critical Taiwan is to the world's economy. Will be interesting to see how the US-China feud evolves knowing how both countries desperately need Taiwan for the stability of their Tech industry

This book by Chris Miller will give you a good overview of the history of the development of microchips, our growing dependence on them and how they became recognised as an essential element of national security.

Chris Miller explains some forces driving our dependence on microchips and how they are now the new front of trade wars.

While the book is breezy, and he gives us a clear history, the explanations and analysis are not deep.

He could have gone deeper into the subject.

Fascinating story of the rise of semiconductor technology, its global and strategic significance and where the power lies. A modern fab lab costs 2x an aircraft carrier(!) but is cutting edge for only 2 years.

Vaclav Smil has already written how foundational technologies like steel, concrete, plastics, and fertilizers underpin our civilization; without these, we would regress thousands of years. Add microchips to this list, a sector marked by a winner-takes-all dynamic, as explained by Chris Miller.

Taiwan Semiconductor is the leading chip foundry, while the Dutch company, ASML, monopolizes EUV technology, vital for future chip generations. In this era of global superpower rivalry, control over these chips could be a deciding factor in conflict outcomes.

Whoever controls this technology, the supply chains and manufacturing facilities may influence the course of global history. Will the world continue to be led by the free and the brave, or will it succumb to the rule of authoritarians, leading to a survival-of-the-fittest society? A big part of the answer depends on the unfolding story of the semiconductor.

Miller's book explores the history and highlights what's at stake, making Chip Wars an essential read for our time.

Readable compelling. A little overboard on the internet of things. Thinks we need chips in coffeemakers

The writing is not outstanding but this does provide a good overview of the chip making industry and especially its consolidation so that the world has become dependant on a small number of key providers. This is especially true of Taiwan, just off the coast of China, where a huge proportion of the world's high end chips are fabricated. The fabs themselves are wildly expensive, costing tens of billions of Dollars to construct. Cutting edge chips are almost impossibly difficult to make, requiring 100 million Dollar lithography machines only made by a single supplier in Holland and the esoteric knowledge of the teams at the fabs in Taiwan, which competitors in other countries have been consistently unable to successfully reproduce.½

Chip War is a fascinating look at the history of the computer chip, from the initial creation of the transistor up to today’s semiconductors with billions (with a “b”) of transistors on a single chip.

Miller starts with a history of Silicon Valley, the growth of early chip makers through the moon mission and military projects in guiding missiles during the Cold War, to the growing commercial market for chips in the seventies and the rise of the PC in the eighties.

The story continues with the growth of DRAM and multipurpose chips, and on into the rise of outsourcing and the separation of chip design from chip manufacture.

Most of the book is made up of relatively short chapters highlighting different companies and individuals important in the history of the chip industry. It is not a scholarly tome (even though the author is a history professor), but more of a general history of the industry and how it has grown in importance over time.

The heart of the book is really in laying those two things out - first in telling the stories of the people who drove the industry forward, and second in relaying the story of the geopolitical importance of computer chips, and how they have driven the economic success of countries like the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Today, China is trying hard to position itself as a leader in the design and manufacture of chips, with some success, but with notable challenges coming from the United States, specifically against Chinese firms ZTE and Huawei.

The semiconductor industry was the leader in globalization and is the poster child for a globalized supply chain. Today however, the US and other countries are pulling back from globalization and focusing on strategic interests in supply chains. This is partly as a result of COVID and partly as a result of belligerent actions by authoritarian regimes, most notably the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

In this new world Taiwan is a particular flashpoint as it is not only the location of the single most advanced and most important chip manufacturer but of course is also considered by China to be part of its territory and is a repeated subject of China’s belligerence. This book really drives home why the US has a strategic interest in Taiwan and should be concerned about the recent Chinese war games in the Taiwan Strait.

Narrator Stephen Graybill did an excellent job.

Rating: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Computer chips are the foundational commodity of the cultures and lifestyles of the 21st century. In this book, Chris Miller outlines the way in which we've come further than ever thought possible by the inventors of the computer chip, and, how the computer chip supply chain is precariously centralized.

Similar to the way that Yasha Levine, in "Surveillance Valley," establishes that a history of the internet is a military history, the history of computer chips is a military history. During the first twenty years of their development, 95% of revenues of computer chip companies came from (US) defense contracts.

Ever wonder where the term "debugging" comes from? Back when computers were composed of tubes, sometimes the tubes would attract moths, and sometimes the moths would damage the tubes (likely losing their lives in the process). "Debugging," was the process of removing the moths, cleaning up the circuitry, and replacing any blown tubes.

The first quarter of the 21st century has thus far also been the story of a growing cold war between China and the United States. This book describes these fronts from the perspectives of chips. Did you know that maintaining cutting-edge chip technology requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment on an annual basis? Miller points out that, not even the US military budget (currently running at about three quarters of a trillion dollars a year) or Apple (with $360 billion in revenues in 2021) would be able to single-handedly maintain cutting edge chip infrastructure. It is necessarily a global, or at least multinational, project.

The technology required to make chips sounds like science fiction. Extreme ultra-violet light (closer in wavelength to x-ray than visible light) is produced by vaporizing droplets of tin with a massively powerful laser 50,000 times per second. This is then reflected on a mirror whose surface, if blow up to the size of Germany, would have tenth-of-a-millimeter variances in flatness, and would be able to aim well enough to hit a golf ball at the range of the moon. Chips have gotten so small that conventional electrical engineering becomes a poor map of reality and quantum tunneling is a challenge (where electrons show up in the "wrong" place).

Moore's law predicted the doubling in chip capacity, but only for one decades time. It has continued, unrelenting, for the past half century. That said, this is no reason to believe this breakneck pace of progress will be sustainable.

Are you curious about the provenance and history of the building blocks of modern life, and curious about the geopolitical tensions that result from the power that comes along with such technology? If so, then this is the book for you!