Book and Author
Chris Miller: Chip War — The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
All modern electronic systems —from LED bulbs to microwaves, smartphones to missiles, electric vehicles to PET scanners — run on semiconductor chips. Until recently, the United States led the world in the design and fabrication of state-of-the-art semiconductor chips. But today, America’s technological superiority is slipping — China is investing heavily to catch up in chip technologies — threatening America’s economic prosperity and military superiority.
In the twenty-first century economic, military, and geostrategic power dominance depends upon the control over state-of-the-art semiconductor chips or microchips aka integrated circuits (ICs). The main semiconductor materials used for the fabrication of high-speed chips are silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), gallium arsenide (GaAs) and Gallium Phosphide (GaP). In the global economy, the semiconductor industry is a major growth sector. In 2021, semiconductor unit sales reached a record 1.15 trillion-unit shipments, and in 2022, semiconductor sales reached 580.13 billionUS dollars worldwide. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the United States and China are the leading semiconductor manufacturers.
According to Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) the share of modern semiconductor manufacturing capacity located in the US has eroded from 37% in 1990 to 12% today, mostly because other countries’ governments have invested ambitiously in chip manufacturing incentives and the US government has not. To address this challenge, in July 2022 the US Congress passed the CHIPS Act of 2022 to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing, design and research, and fortify the economy and national security, and reinforce America’s chip supply chains. Because of the CHIPS act a number of companies have announced plans to invest $187 billion for creating new or expanding semiconductor facilities in 16 states that would create more than 30,000 jobs.
Chip War — The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller chronicles the evolution of technological advances that led to the semiconductor revolution — from development of transistors to integrated circuits (ICs) — that shaped the chip-powered world through constant competitions—among innovators, technologies, corporations, and countries — between the United States and China.
Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He has authored three earlier books—Putinomics, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, and We Shall Be Masters. He received his PhD in history from Yale University.
The author observes that ‘the nation’ — America or China — that controls the state-of-the-art semiconductor industry will control the future of the world. He states that presently thirty-seven percent of global supply of chips comes from Taiwan, which makes China reliant on foreign chips — it spends more on importing chips than buying oil. Discussing the oil supply, the author notes: “Armchair strategists theorize about China's ‘Malacca Dilemma’—a reference to the main shipping channel between the Pacific and Indian Oceans—and the country's ability to access supplies of oil and other commodities amid a crisis. Beijing, however, is more worried about a blockade measured in bytes rather than barrels.”
The book, in addition to sections of Cast of Characters, Glossary, Introduction, and Conclusion, has eight parts with fifty-four chapters: Part I Cold War Chips, Part II The Circuitry Of The American World, Part III Leadership Lost? Part IV America Resurgent, Part V Integrated Circuits, Integrated World?, Part VI Offshoring Innovation?, Part VII China's Challenge, and Part VIII The Chip Choke. The contents of the book are rich in history and business aspects but shallow in technological details.
The author starts the books by describing the cast of characters: Morris Chang: Founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's most important chipmaker. Andy Grove: Former president and CEO of Intel during the 1980s and 1990s. Pat Haggerty: Chairman of Texas Instruments (TI), who led the company as it specialized in building microelectronics. Jack Kilby: TI engineer, Co-inventor of the integrated circuit (IC), in 1958, winner of the Nobel Prize. Jay Lathrop: Co-inventor of photolithography, the masking process for patterning transistors using chemicals and light; Carver Mead: Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), advisor to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, visionary about the future of technology. Gordon Moore: Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, creator of "Moore's Law (1965)," which predicted that the computing power on each chip would double every couple of years. Akio Morita: Co-founder of Sony, represented Japanese business on the world stage during the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Noyce: Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, co-inventor of the integrated circuit (IC). William Perry: Pentagon official from 1977-1981 and later Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997, advocated using chips to produce precision-strike weapons. Jerry Sanders: Founder and CEO of AMD, Silicon Valley's most effective salesperson, and critic of unfair Japanese trade practices in the 1980s. Charlie Sporck: Drove the offshoring of chip assembly while heading manufacturing operations at Fairchild Semiconductor, later served as CEO of National Semiconductor, and Ren Zhengfei: Founder of Huawei — China's telecom and chip-design leader; his daughter Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada (2018) on charges of defying US law in an attempt to evade US sanctions.
The author also defines key terms used in the books to help general readers grasp the technical aspects. Arm: a UK company that licenses chip designers use of an instruction set architecture—a set of basic rules governing how a given chip operates. CPU: central processing unit: a type of ‘general-purpose’ chip that is the workhorse of computing in PCs, phones, and data centers. DRAM: dynamic random access memory, one of two main types of memory chip, which is used to store data temporarily. EDA: electronic design automation, specialized software used to design how millions or billions of transistors will be arrayed on a chip and to simulate their operation. FinFET: a new 3D transistor structure first implemented in the early 2010s to better control transistor operation as transistors' size shrank to nanometer (nm) scale. GPU: graphics processing unit, a chip that is capable of parallel processing. Logic chip: a chip that processes data. Memory chip: a chip that remembers data. NAND: also called ‘flash,’ the second major type of memory chip, used for longer-term data storage. Photolithography: also called ‘lithography,’ the process of shining light or UV through patterned masks, the light then interacts with photoresist chemicals to carve patterns on silicon wafers. RISC-V: an open-source architecture growing in popularity because it is free to use, unlike Arm and x86. Silicon wafer: a circular piece of ultra-pure silicon used for making chips. Transistor: a tiny electric ‘switch’ that turns on (creating a binary 1) or off (a binary 0), basic building block used for digital devices, and x86: an instruction set architecture that is dominant in PCs and data centers, Intel and AMD are the main producers of such chips.
Comparing the current Chip War with WWII and Cold War in terms of key technological factors, the author observes: “China is devoting its best minds and billions of dollars to developing its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America's chip choke. If Beijing succeeds, it will remake the global economy and reset the balance of military power. World War II was decided by steel and aluminum, and followed shortly thereafter by the Cold War, which was defined by atomic weapons. The rivalry between the United States and China may well be determined by computing power. Strategists in Beijing and Washington now realize that all advanced tech—from machine learning to missile systems, from automated vehicles to armed drones—require cutting-edge chips, known more formally as semiconductors or integrated circuits. A tiny number of companies control their production.”
Commenting on the key producer of chips and its major achievements, the author states: “Fabricating and miniaturizing semiconductors has been the greatest engineering challenge of our time. Today, no firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC. In 2020, as the world lurched between lockdowns driven by a virus whose diameter measured around one hundred nanometers —billionths of a meter—TSMC's most advanced facility, Fab 18, was carving microscopic mazes of tiny transistors, etching shapes smaller than half the size of a coronavirus, a hundredth the size of a mitochondria. TSMC replicated this process at a scale previously unparalleled in human history… Apple sold over 100 million iPhone 12s, each powered by an A14 processor chip with 11.8 billion tiny transistors carved into its silicon. In a matter of months, in other words, for just one of the dozen chips in an iPhone, TSMC's Fab 18 fabricated well over 1 quintillion transistors—that is, a number with eighteen zeros behind it.”
Describing the shortage of chips in 2021, the author notes: “… a series of accidents—a fire in a Japanese semiconductor facility; ice storms in Texas, a center of US chipmaking; and a new round of COVID lockdowns in Malaysia, where many chips are assembled and tested—intensified these disruptions. Suddenly, many industries far from Silicon Valley faced debilitating chip shortages. Big carmakers from Toyota to General Motors had to shut factories for weeks because they couldn't acquire the semiconductors they needed. Shortages of even the simplest chips caused factory closures on the opposite side of the world.”
Describing the collaborative nature of chip manufacturing, the author 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. If any one of the steps in the semiconductor production process is interrupted, the world's supply of new computing power is imperiled.”
Comparing the importance of ‘data’ with ‘oil,’ and the firms which control this new ‘oil,’ the author observes: “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…Unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries, our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points: tools, chemicals, and software that often are produced by a handful of companies—and sometimes only by one. No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms. 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. The global network of companies that annually produces a trillion chips at nanometer scale is a triumph of efficiency.”
The author describes ‘the United States versus China’ struggle for chip supremacy viz a viz Taiwan, and observes: “… both Washington and Beijing are fixated on controlling the future of computing—and, to a frightening degree, that future is dependent on a small island that Beijing considers a renegade province and America has committed to defend by force. The interconnections between the chip industries in the US, China, and Taiwan are dizzyingly complex…Some foreign policy strategists in Beijing and Washington dream of decoupling the two countries' tech sectors, but the ultra-efficient international network of chip designers, chemical suppliers, and machine-tool makers that people like Chang helped build can't be easily unwound. Unless, of course, something explodes. Beijing has pointedly refused to rule out the prospect that it might invade Taiwan to ‘reunify’ it with the mainland. But it wouldn't take anything as dramatic as an amphibious assault to send semiconductor-induced shock waves careening through the global economy. Even a partial blockade by Chinese forces would trigger devastating disruptions. A single missile strike on TSMC's most advanced chip fabrication facility could easily cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage once delays to the production of phones, data centers, autos, telecom networks, and other technology are added up. Holding the global economy hostage to one of the world's most dangerous political disputes might seem like an error of historic proportions.”
Chip War — The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller narrates the evolution of technological advances that led to the development of semiconductor revolution and emergence of state-of-the-art chips that shaped the technology-based modern era. The author’s main thesis is that America’s technological edge is fading away, but he fails to propose any ideas for US policy makers — how to win the ‘Chip War.’ Overall, it's an interesting book for general readers, but for technical minds it lacks a scholarly tone and technological depth.
[ Dr Ahmed S. Khan (dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org) is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar.]
