Chris Miller

The best way to deal with international competition in memory chips from Japan, Silicon Valley wagered, was to find an even cheaper source in Korea, while focusing America’s R&D efforts on higher-value products rather than commoditized DRAMs.

In the 1980s Japan challenged the U.S. for semiconductor dominance. Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, cofounders of Sony, pioneered transformative products like the Sony Walkman.

The global network of companies that annually produces a trillion chips at nanometer scale is a triumph of efficiency.

Today, thanks to Moore’s Law, 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.

The making of Moore’s Law is as much a story of manufacturing experts, supply chain specialists, and marketing managers as it is about physicists or electrical engineers.

Multiple transistors could be built into a single slab of silicon or germanium. Kilby called his invention an “integrated circuit,” but it became known colloquially as a “chip,

It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry.

The semiconductor industry was globalizing decades before anyone had heard of the word, laying the grounds for the Asia-centric supply chains we know today.

Micron’s scrappy Idaho engineers outmaneuvered rivals on both sides of the Pacific with their creativity and cost-cutting skill.

The more semiconductor plants on the island, and the more economic ties with the United States, the safer Taiwan would be.

Noyce and Moore abandoned Fairchild as quickly as they’d left Shockley’s startup a decade earlier, and founded Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. In their vision, transistors would become the cheapest product ever produced, but the world would consume trillions and trillions of them.

The U.S. had supported Japan’s postwar transformation into a transistor salesman. U.S. occupation authorities transferred knowledge about the invention of the transistor to Japanese physicists, while policymakers in Washington ensured Japanese firms like Sony could easily sell into U.S. markets.

Japan’s government subsidized its chipmakers, too. Unlike in the U.S., where antitrust law discouraged chip firms from collaborating, the Japanese government pushed companies to work together.

Silicon Valley’s resurgence was driven by scrappy startups and by wrenching corporate transformations. The U.S. overtook Japan’s DRAM behemoths not by replicating them but by innovating around them.

Huawei’s equipment now plays an important—and in many countries, crucial—role in transmitting the world’s data.

The KGB began stealing semiconductor manufacturing equipment, too. The CIA claimed that the USSR had acquired nearly every facet of the semiconductor manufacturing process.

The Soviet Union had many more tanks than the United States, but Ogarkov realized his tanks would soon be many times more vulnerable in a fight with the U.S.

The new technologies Perry had pushed the Pentagon to develop during the late 1970s performed even beyond his expectations. The Iraqi military—armed with some of the best equipment the Soviet Union’s defense industry produced—was helpless in the face of the American assault.

Soon China’s government declared that “science and technology” were “the crux of the Four Modernizations.” The rest of the world was being transformed by a technological revolution, and China’s scientists realized that chips were at the core of this change.

The company’s success in domesticating technology was only possible thanks to this foreign-trained workforce.

The dominant belief in the U.S. government was that expanding trade and supply chain connections would promote peace by encouraging powers like Russia or China to focus on acquiring wealth rather than geopolitical power.

A new consensus in Washington formed around the idea that the best policy was to “run faster” than America’s rivals.

The problem was simple: each generation of technological improvement made fabs more expensive.

Today, building an advanced logic fab costs $20 billion, an enormous capital investment that few firms can afford.

Mobile devices would be a 'game-changer' for the chip industry, he told Forbes, perceiving them as heralding shifts as significant as the PC had brought.

TSMC knows it is important to use everyone’s innovation, ours, that of the equipment makers, of our customers, and of the IP providers. That’s the power of the Grand Alliance.

The iPhone’s most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.

Intel’s leaders had to split their attention between chip design and chip manufacturing. They ended up bungling both.

The Chinese market was so enticing that companies found it nearly impossible to avoid transferring technology.

U.S. and UK chip architectures and designs as well as Taiwanese foundries have played a central role in the development of China’s supercomputer programs.

The company has developed efficient manufacturing processes that have driven down costs and built products that customers see as high-quality.

The Cold War arms race, it’s worth remembering, wasn’t won by the first country to shoot a satellite into space. Yet China’s capabilities when it comes to AI systems are undeniably impressive.

The U.S. military will only succeed, in other words, if it has a decisive technological advantage.

China’s leaders have identified their reliance on foreign chipmakers as a critical vulnerability.

Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.

We should accept that China will be a global tech power in the future and start managing the risk now, rather than pretending the west can sit out China’s technological rise." - Robert Hannigan, former head of the UK’s signals intelligence agency

The United States needs to strangle Huawei," Republican senator Ben Sasse declared in 2020. "Modern wars are fought with semiconductors and we were letting Huawei use our American designs.

China’s leaders were willing to do almost anything in their fight against the coronavirus, but their effort to build a semiconductor industry took priority.

What is plausible is for China to reduce its reliance on the United States in certain spheres and to increase its overall weight in the chip industry, weaning itself off as many choke-point technologies as possible.

The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It’s driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

The real supply chain lesson of the past few years is not about fragility but about profits and power. Taiwan’s extraordinary ascent shows how one company—with a vision and with government financial support— can remake an entire industry.

If China were to succeed in pressuring Taiwan into giving Beijing equal access—or even preferential access—to TSMC’s fabs, the U.S. and Japan would surely respond by placing new limits on the export of advanced machinery and materials.

The world’s chip industry, as well as the assembly of all the electronic goods chips enable, depends more on the Taiwan Strait and the South China coast than on any other chunk of the world’s territory except Silicon Valley.

The Russia-Ukraine War also illustrates the extent to which any large conflict will be determined in part by a country’s position in the semiconductor supply chain, which will shape its ability to wield military and economic power.

The durability of Moore’s Law, in other words, has surprised even the person who it’s named after and the person who coined it. It may well surprise today’s pessimists, too.

Bob Noyce realized it was the civilian computer market, not the military, that would drive chip demand. He aggressively cut prices so that chips could be plugged into civilian computers, fueling the industry’s growth.

In 1958, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built multiple electronic components on a single block of semiconductor material—the first “integrated circuit,” or “chip.

The first major order for Texas Instruments’ chips was for the guidance computer on the Minuteman II missile.

When Morris Chang was passed over for the CEO job at Texas Instruments, he moved to Taiwan where he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and built the country’s chip industry.

The best way to deal with international competition in memory chips from Japan, Silicon Valley wagered, was to find an even cheaper source in Korea, while focusing America’s R&D efforts on higher-value products rather than commoditized DRAMs.

In the 1980s Japan challenged the U.S. for semiconductor dominance. Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, cofounders of Sony, pioneered transformative products like the Sony Walkman.

The global network of companies that annually produces a trillion chips at nanometer scale is a triumph of efficiency.

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 ASML 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.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil.

Today, thanks to Moore’s Law, 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.

The making of Moore’s Law is as much a story of manufacturing experts, supply chain specialists, and marketing managers as it is about physicists or electrical engineers.

Multiple transistors could be built into a single slab of silicon or germanium. Kilby called his invention an “integrated circuit,” but it became known colloquially as a “chip,

It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry.

The semiconductor industry was globalizing decades before anyone had heard of the word, laying the grounds for the Asia-centric supply chains we know today.

Micron’s scrappy Idaho engineers outmaneuvered rivals on both sides of the Pacific with their creativity and cost-cutting skill.

The more semiconductor plants on the island, and the more economic ties with the United States, the safer Taiwan would be.

Noyce and Moore abandoned Fairchild as quickly as they’d left Shockley’s startup a decade earlier, and founded Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. In their vision, transistors would become the cheapest product ever produced, but the world would consume trillions and trillions of them.

The U.S. had supported Japan’s postwar transformation into a transistor salesman. U.S. occupation authorities transferred knowledge about the invention of the transistor to Japanese physicists, while policymakers in Washington ensured Japanese firms like Sony could easily sell into U.S. markets.

Japan’s government subsidized its chipmakers, too. Unlike in the U.S., where antitrust law discouraged chip firms from collaborating, the Japanese government pushed companies to work together.

Silicon Valley’s resurgence was driven by scrappy startups and by wrenching corporate transformations. The U.S. overtook Japan’s DRAM behemoths not by replicating them but by innovating around them.

Huawei’s equipment now plays an important—and in many countries, crucial—role in transmitting the world’s data.

The KGB began stealing semiconductor manufacturing equipment, too. The CIA claimed that the USSR had acquired nearly every facet of the semiconductor manufacturing process.

The Soviet Union had many more tanks than the United States, but Ogarkov realized his tanks would soon be many times more vulnerable in a fight with the U.S.

The new technologies Perry had pushed the Pentagon to develop during the late 1970s performed even beyond his expectations. The Iraqi military—armed with some of the best equipment the Soviet Union’s defense industry produced—was helpless in the face of the American assault.

Soon China’s government declared that “science and technology” were “the crux of the Four Modernizations.” The rest of the world was being transformed by a technological revolution, and China’s scientists realized that chips were at the core of this change.

The company’s success in domesticating technology was only possible thanks to this foreign-trained workforce.

The dominant belief in the U.S. government was that expanding trade and supply chain connections would promote peace by encouraging powers like Russia or China to focus on acquiring wealth rather than geopolitical power.

A new consensus in Washington formed around the idea that the best policy was to “run faster” than America’s rivals.

The problem was simple: each generation of technological improvement made fabs more expensive.

Today, building an advanced logic fab costs $20 billion, an enormous capital investment that few firms can afford.

Mobile devices would be a 'game-changer' for the chip industry, he told Forbes, perceiving them as heralding shifts as significant as the PC had brought.

TSMC knows it is important to use everyone’s innovation, ours, that of the equipment makers, of our customers, and of the IP providers. That’s the power of the Grand Alliance.

The iPhone’s most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.

Intel’s leaders had to split their attention between chip design and chip manufacturing. They ended up bungling both.

The Chinese market was so enticing that companies found it nearly impossible to avoid transferring technology.

U.S. and UK chip architectures and designs as well as Taiwanese foundries have played a central role in the development of China’s supercomputer programs.

The company has developed efficient manufacturing processes that have driven down costs and built products that customers see as high-quality.

The Cold War arms race, it’s worth remembering, wasn’t won by the first country to shoot a satellite into space. Yet China’s capabilities when it comes to AI systems are undeniably impressive.

The U.S. military will only succeed, in other words, if it has a decisive technological advantage.

China’s leaders have identified their reliance on foreign chipmakers as a critical vulnerability.

Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.

We should accept that China will be a global tech power in the future and start managing the risk now, rather than pretending the west can sit out China’s technological rise." - Robert Hannigan, former head of the UK’s signals intelligence agency

The United States needs to strangle Huawei," Republican senator Ben Sasse declared in 2020. "Modern wars are fought with semiconductors and we were letting Huawei use our American designs.

China’s leaders were willing to do almost anything in their fight against the coronavirus, but their effort to build a semiconductor industry took priority.

What is plausible is for China to reduce its reliance on the United States in certain spheres and to increase its overall weight in the chip industry, weaning itself off as many choke-point technologies as possible.

The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It’s driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

The real supply chain lesson of the past few years is not about fragility but about profits and power. Taiwan’s extraordinary ascent shows how one company—with a vision and with government financial support— can remake an entire industry.

If China were to succeed in pressuring Taiwan into giving Beijing equal access—or even preferential access—to TSMC’s fabs, the U.S. and Japan would surely respond by placing new limits on the export of advanced machinery and materials.

The world’s chip industry, as well as the assembly of all the electronic goods chips enable, depends more on the Taiwan Strait and the South China coast than on any other chunk of the world’s territory except Silicon Valley.

The Russia-Ukraine War also illustrates the extent to which any large conflict will be determined in part by a country’s position in the semiconductor supply chain, which will shape its ability to wield military and economic power.

The durability of Moore’s Law, in other words, has surprised even the person who it’s named after and the person who coined it. It may well surprise today’s pessimists, too.

Bob Noyce realized it was the civilian computer market, not the military, that would drive chip demand. He aggressively cut prices so that chips could be plugged into civilian computers, fueling the industry’s growth.

In 1958, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built multiple electronic components on a single block of semiconductor material—the first “integrated circuit,” or “chip.

The first major order for Texas Instruments’ chips was for the guidance computer on the Minuteman II missile.

When Morris Chang was passed over for the CEO job at Texas Instruments, he moved to Taiwan where he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and built the country’s chip industry.