Chip War Quotes

“China’s import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi’s Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia’s export of oil or Germany’s export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“In polite company in Washington and Silicon Valley, it was easier simply to repeat words like multilateralism, globalization, and innovation, concepts that were too vacuous to offend anyone in a position of power. The chip industry itself—deeply fearful of angering China or TSMC—put its considerable lobbying resources behind repeating false platitudes about how “global” the industry had become. These concepts fit naturally with the liberal internationalist ethos that guided officials of both political parties amid America’s unipolar moment. Meetings with foreign companies and governments were more pleasant when everyone pretended that cooperation was win-win. So Washington kept telling itself that the U.S. was running faster, blindly ignoring the deterioration in the U.S. position, the rise in China’s capabilities, and the staggering reliance on Taiwan and South Korea, which grew more conspicuous every year.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“In the early 2010s, Nvidia—the designer of graphic chips—began hearing rumors of PhD students at Stanford using Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) for something other than graphics. GPUs were designed to work differently from standard Intel or AMD CPUs, which are infinitely flexible but run all their calculations one after the other. GPUs, by contrast, are designed to run multiple iterations of the same calculation at once. This type of “parallel processing,” it soon became clear, had uses beyond controlling pixels of images in computer games. It could also train AI systems efficiently.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The scientific networks that produced EUV spanned the world, bringing together scientists from countries as diverse as America, Japan, Slovenia, and Greece. However, the manufacturing of EUV wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized. A single supply chain managed by a single company would control the future of lithography.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“With Huawei’s design arm proving itself world-class, it wasn’t hard to imagine a future in which Chinese chip design firms were as important customers of TSMC as Silicon Valley giants. If the trends of the late 2010s were projected forward, by 2030 China’s chip industry might rival Silicon Valley for influence. This wouldn’t simply disrupt tech firms and trade flows. It would also reset the balance of military power.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The company’s engineers realized the best approach was to shoot a tiny ball of tin measuring thirty-millionths of a meter wide moving through a vacuum at a speed of around two hundred miles per hour. The tin is then struck twice with a laser, the first pulse to warm it up, the second to blast it into a plasma with a temperature around half a million degrees, many times hotter than the surface of the sun. This process of blasting tin is then repeated fifty thousand times per second to produce EUV light in the quantities necessary to fabricate chips.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The only other major competitor was Samsung, whose foundry business had technology that was roughly comparable to TSMC’s, though the company possessed far less production capacity. Complications arose, though, because part of Samsung’s operation involved building chips that it designed in-house. Whereas a company like TSMC builds chips for dozens of customers and focuses relentlessly on keeping them happy, Samsung had its own line of smartphones and other consumer electronics, so it was competing with many of its customers. Those firms worried that ideas shared with Samsung’s chip foundry might end up in other Samsung products. TSMC and GlobalFoundries had no such conflicts of interest.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Around the early 2010s, it became unfeasible to pack transistors more densely by shrinking them two dimensionally. One challenge was that, as transistors were shrunk according to Moore’s Law, the narrow length of the conductor channel occasionally caused power to “leak” through the circuit even when the switch was off. On top of this, the layer of silicon dioxide atop each transistor became so thin that quantum effects like “tunneling”—jumping through barriers that classical physics said should be insurmountable—began seriously impacting transistor performance.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Jacobs, whose faith in Moore’s Law was as strong as ever, thought a more complicated system of frequency-hopping would work better. Rather than keeping a given phone call on a certain frequency, he proposed moving call data between different frequencies, letting him cram more calls into available spectrum space. Most people thought he was right in theory, but that such a system would never work in practice. Voice quality would be low, they argued, and calls would be dropped. The amount of processing needed to move call data between frequencies and have it interpreted by a phone on the other end seemed enormous. Jacobs disagreed, founding a company called Qualcomm—Quality Communications—in 1985 to prove the point. He built a small network with a couple cell towers to prove it would work. Soon the entire industry realized Qualcomm’s system would make it possible to fit far more cell phone calls into existing spectrum space by relying on Moore’s Law to run the algorithms that make sense of all the radio waves bouncing around.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“From day one, TSMC wasn’t really a private business: it was a project of the Taiwanese state.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The advances in computing power that Perry’s vision required seemed like science fiction to many critics, who assumed guided missile technology would improve slowly because tanks and planes changed slowly, too. Exponential increases, which Moore’s Law dictated, are rarely seen and hard to comprehend. However, Perry wasn’t alone in predicting a “ten to a hundredfold” improvement. Intel was promising the very same thing to its customers. Perry grumbled that his congressional critics were “Luddites,” who simply didn’t understand how rapidly chips were changing.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Outside a small number of military theorists and electrical engineers, therefore, hardly anyone realized Vietnam had been a successful testing ground for weapons that married microelectronics and explosives in ways that would revolutionize warfare and transform American military power.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want,” Morita declared. “The public does not know what is possible, but we do.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“One U.S. semiconductor executive wryly summed things up to a White House official: “Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“We are really the revolutionaries in the world today,” Gordon Moore declared in 1973, “not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“A facility to fabricate the most advanced logic chips costs twice as much as an aircraft carrier but will only be cutting-edge for a couple of years.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. 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.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“ASML’s EUV lithography tool is the most expensive mass-produced machine tool in history, so complex it’s impossible to use without extensive training from ASML personnel, who remain on-site for the tool’s entire life span.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The Soviet Union’s effort to reinvigorate its chipmakers failed completely. Neither the Soviets nor their socialist allies could ever catch up, despite vast espionage campaigns and huge sums poured into research facilities like those in Zelenograd.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“In the age of AI, it’s often said that data is the new oil. Yet the real limitation we face isn’t the availability of data but of processing power.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“For every major chip firm, the Chinese consumer market is far more important a customer than the U.S. government.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Ultimately, Zeiss created mirrors that were the smoothest objects ever made, with impurities that were almost imperceptibly small. If the mirrors in an EUV system were scaled to the size of Germany, the company said, their biggest irregularities would be a tenth of a millimeter. To direct EUV light with precision, they must be held perfectly still, requiring mechanics and sensors so exact that Zeiss boasted they could be used to aim a laser to hit a golf ball as far away as the moon.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon “the formula of ‘the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported’ ” and replace it with “ ‘the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.’ ” This “Made in China” obsession was hardwired into the Communist Party’s worldview, but the country was hopelessly behind in semiconductor technology—something that neither Mao’s mass mobilization nor Deng’s diktat could easily change.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, UK-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit, and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese, and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Chip sales to the Apollo program transformed Fairchild from a small startup into a firm with one thousand employees. Sales ballooned from $500,000 in 1958 to $21 million two years later.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Kilby called his invention an “integrated circuit,” but it became known colloquially as a “chip,” because each integrated circuit was made from a piece of silicon “chipped” off a circular silicon wafer.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology