Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

- Chip wars, tell us a story of something that has become dominant in our current age, of how the technological digital revolution has literally revolutionised our world using small chips, which contain the ability to power a whole computer, on a chip that is smaller by in size than a third of a fingernail. How we have from moved from something that was used to take up whole rooms and offices in a factory floor, can now be fitted onto something so small. The fact that the story is told in such a thrilling and exciting way that keeps you gripped is a masterpiece because it really is a thrilling story learning how they all these chips (or semiconductor transmitter chips) came about, and how we got here. - A chip is a small piece of semiconducting material, usually silicone, with millions or billions of microscopic transistors carved into it. It is also known as an ‘integrated circuit’ or ‘semiconductor. We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world. At the core of computing is the need for many millions of ones and zeros, of which the entire digital universe consists of. Around a quarter of the chips industry’s revenue comes from phones, which pays for the semiconductors inside. - All around us and everything that we use, from washing machines to cars, missiles, and rockets, as well as your mobile phone and computer, are all controlled by chips. The book really illuminates and enlightens through a fascinating history of how we’ve moved from the industrial age to the digital age and at such a phenomenal speed. The book explains how digital transmitter chips have evolved, moving from transistors to chips that can use something smaller than you nail to power an entire computer. It’s amazing to think it took 1.2 million years before someone put a handle on to an axe, 66 years separated the first flight and putting a man on the moon – the internet has only been around for less than 16000 days. - The book explains the fascinating history and evolution that now power and generate so many different things that we just take for granted. And yet the moral of the story is how America led the way in creating and transforming these chips into something remarkable that could be used in so many ways. Slowly they succeeded power to the manufacturers of Japan and Taiwan, who are now the only people that can create these chips. America lost its way, and this book explains how that occurred. The Financial Times declared this as a business book of the year. And its why China wants control over Taiwan. China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends of oil. We might not think much about chips, but they’ve created the modern world in which we now live in. - Moore’s Law predicted that the computing power on each chip would double every couple of years. America gave the world chips and created them, starting with turning chips upside down and viewing them through a microscope to be able to see the features more clearly, that they could then make smaller and with smaller transistor chips led to a device that has allowed the world to use resources that power the world more effectively, more cheaply and more effectively. - We are so reliant now on chips that support pocket calculators to the car that you're driving, the aeroplane that you're flying in, the air-conditioning in a room, the computer on your phone and yet if Taiwan suffered a major earthquake (its happened) or a Chinese invasion, then we would be set back years. However, reading the book also shows that China would have to be suicidally crazy to attack Taiwan. - I put off reading this for a while as I thought it would be dull but when I started to read, I found the subject fascinating. I now know that there are more chips made every day than the amounts of cells that make up the human body. There are now microscopic transistors that are far smaller than a human cell (you can fit thousands of cells on a pin head). Today, advanced chips possess tiny, three-dimensional transistors, each smaller than a coronavirus, measuring a handful of manometers (billionths of a meter) wide – and you can fit 100 million viral particles of the coronavirus on a pinhead. The semiconductor industry now produces more transistors each day than there are cells in the human body (approximately 30 trillion human cells make up the human body). - I found this an interesting and absolutely gripping book about subject that I thought be as dry as a bone but made me feel more secure about the quality of chips, say in my car – there are rockets passing Pluto and still sending back messages and flying through our solar system and still sending messages back to planet Earth.

A well researched and exciting narrative history of semiconductor manufacturing by US corporations that is very entertaining. Almost a non-fiction thriller in fact ! However it is a very US centric. This is surprising on two counts: the youth of the author and the sheer international scale of chip manufacturing. Prepare to read for example that the US was the sole actor in the first Iraq war, that ARM was created by an ‘Apple startup’ , that it was ‘hard to understand’ why the UK (amongst others) resisted Trump’s invocations to ban Huawei (is the author aware of how the world outside the US views Donald Trump ?) or how strange it is that a small country like the Netherlands should be an exclusive manufacturer of Advanced Semiconductor Photolithography. The narrative seems to cast the US as the universal inventor of all semiconductor things good and largely dismisses the successes of US allies in the same field by either: not mentioning them, attributing their successes to IP theft, market dumping or rare chance. For example, the home of ARM is a reliable ally of the US and ten times as many ARM processors as x86 chips were shipped globally in 2021. Yet the ARM story was not told in the book in anything like the fond detail that was lavished on American innovators. One has a high index of suspicion that that is because that success didn’t happen in America. There are other similar omissions: Open Source Software’s impact on chip consumption has been profound. Open Source Software is not an American corporate invention but it did do the world a favour by breaking the Intel/Windows corporate monopoly. That was a profoundly good thing that allowed the global explosion of cheap consumer mobile processors running on batteries. The only real mention of this in the book is to view this within the lens of a US corporate failure. I would say that a future edition of this book needs these points addressing and quite possibly a fairer narrative attributed to the Asian players as well. By the way: my family is half American (and half not).

This is one of the books that make you smarter as you read each page. It literally provides the history of how modern technology was developed and how it impacted the geopolitical landscape. One of my favourite quotes I found in the book: "High tech is foreign policy". Greatly narrated as well. I recommended it to 2 of my friends and they enjoyed it too.

The book is the product of brilliance, meticulous research comprising both original sources and an extensive net of roughly one hundred interviews and a nearly phenomenal ability of the author to present complex issues with crystalline clarity. To appreciate the significance of the conflict, one has to realize that the future of war will be defined by computer power. And to appreciate the enormous evolution of chips suffice it to say that an Apple iPhone 12 is powered by an A14 processor chip with 11.8 billion transistors carved into its silicon while only sixty years ago the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip was just four. It was Gordon Moore that noticed in 1965 that the number of components that could fit on a chip and consequently computing power was doubling every two years; the prediction that the computer power would grow exponentially was called 'Moore's Law'. At the core of computing is the need for many millions of 1s and 0s. The entire digital universe consists of these two numbers. Every button on an iPhone, every email, photograph, and YouTube Video - all of these are coded, ultimately, in vast strings of 1s and 0s. But these numbers do not actually exist. They are expressions of electrical currents, which are either on (1) or off (0). A chip is a grid of millions or billions of transistors, tiny electrical switches that flip on and off to process these digits, to remember them, and to convert real world sensations like images, sound, and radio waves into millions and millions of 1s and 0s. The cost of processing and remembering 1s and 0s has fallen by by a billionfold in the past half century. The evolution of chips was shaped by economics, the military, space, politics, geopolitics, and globalization. The term Silicon Valley was coined in the seventies to reflect the nearly absolute dominance of California in the sphere of chips. America may have lost the war in Vietnam but won the subsequent peace by integrating South East Asia in chip production. To this day, however, while semiconductor supply chains requires components from many cities and countries, still almost every chip made has a Silicon Valley connection or is produced with tools designed and built in California. It has, however, to be noted that Taiwan's TSMC fabricates the chips that provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year while it builds almost all the world's most advanced processor chips; two South Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips; and the Dutch ASML builds one hundred percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which cutting edge chips are impossible to make. The book was one of the more important books I have read in recent years in both content and delivery.

Who’d have thought a book about computer chips could be a page-turner? Yet that’s exactly what Chris Miller delivers in Chip War — a gripping, accessible history of technological development and the geopolitical power struggles it fuels. What stood out most was the cast of characters spanning more than half a century, each instrumental in shaping the digital infrastructure of the modern world. As we enter an era defined by AI proliferation and intensifying competition between China and the United States, it’s clear the story of the chip is far from over

A really interesting read with some thoughtful analysis. It is, however, very US centric. The author is very adept at explaining the issues around chip development and manufacturing and the development and manufacturing processes that actually lead to chip production.

Excellent read...wish I had read it when first published.

Superb book and Chip manufacturing and so relevant for today re AI and Taiwan.