Notes for: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

title: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology author: Chris Miller published: 2022 edition: 1 ISBN: 978-1982172008

Summary

• semiconductor chips can be broadly classified into the following categories
  • DRAM, which are temporary storage
  • NAND, which are persistent storage
  • Logic Chips, which can be used for both CPU for general purpose sequential execution or GPU for simple operations parallel execution
  • Specialised Chips, like IR transceiver etc.
• performance benchmark for semiconductor chips
  • the smaller a transistor node, the more nodes can be fit on a chip
  • the more heat efficient the chip will be
  • the cutting edge is currently 2nm node (with 1.6 nm fabs under construction now)
• the current state of semiconductor production is a tightly knitted international web of supply chain dependencies
• in the beginning, US companies may have innovated chip fabrication, photolitography, but they lost market share over time after an initial period of dominance
  • companies started offshoring their assembly and even fabrication for lower cost
  • new companies enter the market that only specialize in chip design, no fabrication
  • the emerging fabrication companies in Asia only specialise in fab, achieving economies of scale and lower cost
  • equipment companies heavily researched on cutting edge fabrication technology and achieve global dominance in photolitography
• the lesson learnt: only by globalising the business, can any companies achieve an economy of scale to make newer technologies commercialisable
  • Russian semiconductor industry only depended on military contracts during the Cold War and lost in the innovation race
  • Intel invested on vertical capabilities (chip design and in-house foundry) but didn’t pay off as it could not achieve fabrication economic of scales for smaller semiconductor nodes
  • Chinese provincial government invested in semiconductor industry at a local scale, and all projects failed to produce any results
  • EOS have benefited both equipment manufacturing and fabrication. It doesn’t affect chip designing, since chip design is not capital intensive.

Supply Chain and Integration

• the fabrication tools and machines are supplied by a few dominating companies
  • ASML from Netherlands, cutting edge photolitography machines. Other competitors are Canon, Nikon from Japan, Microtek from Germany
  • Applied Materials from USA, supplies other tools for chip manufacturing
  • and some others, can be googled
• the fabrication is dominated by a few players
  • TSMC from Taiwan, has a largest market share for logic chip production. It achieves economic of scale and has the capabilities to produce the smallest nodes in the world.
  • Samsung from South Korea has the second largest market share. Followed by Intel and GlobalFoundries from USA.
  • a couple of notable players
    • SK Hynix from South Korea. South Korea companies also dominates DRAM and NAND production.
    • SMIC from China, heavily subsidized by the state
    • MIcron and Broadcom from America
• chip design has low barrier to entry since it is not capital intensive
  • Google design their own Tensorflow TPU for their GCP compute instances
  • Apple design their own Apple Silicon chips
  • AWS design their own Graviton processors
  • Nvidia with the leading GPU design
• given the nature of the semiconductor industry, which is only commercialisable at a global scale, any war or natural disaster that disrupt the production supply chain will be devastating to the global economy

Notable computer architecture

• x86 is the legacy design that Intel used to dominate the market
• ARM is created by Arm Limited from UK
• RISC-V, is an open-source, RISC based architecture