Chip War : Book Review

Book Review #20

Silicon Chips today help run everything from cars and toys to phones and nuclear missiles. Last week, I finished reading "Chip War" by Prof. Chris Miller, where he outlines the evolution and the major geopolitical implications of the Chip industry in today's day and age. Here is a summary of this interesting story in my words

- Vacuum tubes with a positive (Anode) and negative (Cathode) electrode when combined with control electrode served as the first controlled amplifiers (transistors) of electrical signals. In 1947, William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen created the world’s first transistor made out of semiconductor materials beginning the end for vacuum tubes

- In 1955, eight engineers working under Shockley, including Bob Noyce (who invented the Integrated Circuit) and Gordon Moore left to start Fairchild Semiconductor tracing the early beginnings of Silicon Valley. Moore predicted that the number of transistors crammed on a silicon chip would double every two years and this has held true since the 1960s. Noyce and Moore later founded Intel together

- Failure to land missiles on target cost the US dearly in the Vietnam war but microchips help solve this and powered a decisive victory for the US in the 1991 Gulf war. While Nikita Khrushchev's USSR slipped in chip technoligy, Mao Zedong's cultural revolution pushed the Chinese also behind through the 70s

- Trying to beat high quality/low cost chips by Japanese companies, the US brought chip manufacturing to Korea, Taiwan and Singapore and over time the industry has concentrated and today a tiny number of companies control chip production

- Morris Chang, overlooked by Texas Instruments for CEO, started Taiwan Semiconductor Company (TSMC) with government support and TSMC today carves microscopic mazes of tiny transistors smaller than half the size of a coronavirus. Today, western companies focus only on chip design leaving the fabrication to TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and few other companies

- China, as a late entrant, decided to invest in chip companies with government support first through SMIC in the year 2000 and soon after with Huawei. While Huawei had some initial benefits from intellectual property theft, much of their success was driven by efficient manufacturing and world-leading R&D. Huawei's ascendence and the fear of spying tools led to Australia, UK and US invoke a series of restrictions that weakened Huawei and made them divest part of their smartphone business and delay 5G rollouts

- China's array of warfare capabilities including long-range & anti-ship missiles and anti-satellite systems make them a powerful opponent of the US. While the optimists hope that there will be no attempt From China to invade Taiwan, the concentration of the chip industry in Taiwan (37% of the world's logic chips) puts the world at a huge economic risk should there be a conflict

Overall, a thrilling book and a must read!

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