Chip Wars by Chris Miller — part I

There are no loading docks in Washington D. C. said my brother who lives there.  He’s right.  D. C. doesn’t produce anything physical, as do most, if not all, people reading this blog.  I didn’t meet anyone involved in manufacturing until I was nearly fifty, and that only because the head of a local factory was an amateur cellist.

Chip Wars is an extremely important book.  I picked it up because it’s about computers, and neurologists are all interested in computers in the hope that understanding them will tell us something about how the brain works.  But Chip Wars is really about manufacturing and its contents should be read and understood by the general public and not just techies, although a technical background certainly won’t hurt, and I’ll assume you have some.   The larger and more important issues aren’t technical and the technical stuff can be skipped.

So this is a description of the contents of Chip Wars rather than a review, so I could now become president of Harvard having explicitly avoided plagiarism.

I also have skin in the game as one son and daughter-in-law and 2 grandkids  live in Taiwan, which is one of two places where the state of the art in computer chip manufacture is located (e.g. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company aka TSMC ).   The other is South Korea.   TSMC is probably why Xi hasn’t invaded long ago, and why the USA has a compelling (and nonpolitical) reason for protecting it (and Taiwan).

So what will follow in subsequent posts is a blow by blow description of the contents, with a few remarks by me.  You need to know how the USA came to its present sorry state in two crucial technologies, chip manufacturing and lithography.

Stay tuned.

A final true fact so improbable that it could never be put in a novel.  The brother of my cellist friend was a literature professor at Cornell taking over from Nabokov and my son took a course from him.