Book Review: Chip War by Chris Miller

This book titled Chip War - The fight for the world's most critical technology by Chris Miller came out in late 2022 and became a best seller quickly garnering a lot attention. Since I keep yapping about semiconductors all the time, many friends, including my own team members who have read the book kept asking me if I had read it. Since I am slow reader, who still haven't learned to skim through a book perfunctorily, I remained reluctant to pick it up. I thought it may not have a lot of new material for me to learn, as we have been living this history for the past few decades. But the noise about the book was getting deafening, with our own CEO interviewing the author, and various news media outlets incessantly talking about it. So, decided to pick it up from the local library. While I should honestly say there wasn't a ton of new information for the semiconductor industry oldies like myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It felt similar to watching a good movie you liked for the second time! If you are not in the semiconductor industry, I will highly recommend this book as the material is written in an extremely accessible prose covering lucidly not only the old history but the current status and how critical this technology is for the entire world.

Author is not an industry expert but an academic, who teaches international history. Since he has taken the time and put in the effort to grok a lot of material, conducted a ton of firsthand interviews, the story arc has come out very well, bearing his international history background as the overarching signature. Most of the individual chapters are only 4, 5 pages long, while the total book spans a respectable 350 pages. Starting from cold war days, the invention of integrated circuits, book chronicles how this technology originally invented in the US, was taken over by countries like Japan in the 80's forcing companies to reinvent themselves. There are several stories and personalities from Intel since it is a quintessential part of the world's chip industry history. While in the late 80's it looked like US has totally lost the leadership, US companies managed to out invent everyone else, bringing the leadership back to the US for couple of decades. But the subsequent developments, such as the emergence of TSMC that prints chips for most of the world, has reshaped the world and this market. Countries like Russia and China see the importance of being a leader in this domain from both military and civilian national requirements but haven't succeeded in becoming serious players so far, despite a lot of government push, deluge of subsidies and even industrial espionage. While most people in the world think of chips as some commodity similar to potato chips (i.e. fungible, gets produced somewhere and used somewhere, without the locations mattering much), the pandemic that resulted in chip shortage that brought things like automobile production lines to a halt, helped the world realize how smoothly this supply chain has been running in the background.

Though US controls many choke points such as high-end chip design software, currently the manufacturing prowess to produce the most advanced chips sit with TSMC and Samsung. Our company Intel Corp is trying to catch up, working with companies like ASML that manufacture the machines needed to make these cutting-edge chips. Building each generation machines and factories costing literally tens of billions of dollars involving extreme specialization makes this cutthroat competitive world a difficult one to survive. Just take a look at this one short video our company has put out to see how complex the technology is. If you pay attention to the process of generating the UV light that doesn't exist naturally, you will see why the effort we need to go through and the technology that need to work flawlessly to print the next gen microchips is truly mind boggling. If you don't ask. "Are you kidding me? Is this for real?", you weren't paying attention. 

While I am tempted to write a lot more, I am trying to keep this short and will highly encourage those who are not working in the field of semiconductors to reach this book to understand the breadth and importance of this field. Same recommendation for new young engineers in this field as well! 

Time to go back to The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee that I am only halfway through!