“Chip War”

Chris Miller

I wound up with pages and pages of notes to discuss this book during the actual book club session, but I think I’m going to keep this review short — in no small part because I’m tagging it geopolitics, and as I’m writing this in February of 2025 to be posted roughly a year later, anything I have to say about that is likely to have aged.

The history components were interesting; I knew the very broad strokes of the foundation of Silicon Valley, but I’m so used to the current “it’s all manufactured in Asia” state of affairs that I’d honestly lost track of the fact that it’s Silicon Valley because they manufactured silicon chips there originally. My other “no duh” moment was the realization that of course TSMC was founded with massive support from the Taiwanese government. It’s in the name, Grey. Keep up.

Other than those bits, the thing that most stuck with me was the actual technology of lithography, and exactly how ridiculous it has gotten. It’s extreme-ultraviolet lithography because the light waves in the visual spectrum were bigger than the transistors they need to print. The mirrors are so smooth that, if you scaled them up to the size of Germany, their largest imperfections would be a millimeter or so—and the targeting systems built for those mirrors are so precise that they could target a golf ball on the moon. And, lastly, the cooling fans for the lasers need to spin so fast that ball bearings were too much friction, so they are maglev fans. No wonder those EUV machines cost half a billion dollars each.

Overall: an interesting read, though already feeling a bit dated; by the time you’re reading this, it’ll probably be a bit more dated, but the background remains useful. Worth a read.1