Book Notes: Chip War
Full book title: Chip War: The Fight for The World's Most Critical Technology
What It’s About:A broad survey of the entire semiconductor industry. The book covers the entire history of how semiconductors (“chips”) came to be so important and the rise of Silicon Valley via the chip industry.
The book also spends a fair amount of time on the backstories of the key players and companies in the space—people like Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, and Morris Chang, companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and ASML.
It also touches on the current open questions and challenges facing the chip industry, with a focus on the tense relationship between the U.S. and China and how that has affected the chip industry.
What Stuck
The story of the chip industry is a good reminder of the supremacy of incremental improvement, work ethic, and fierce competition. A lot of tech lore and storytelling today is about visionaries knowing secret tricks or doing something unconventional that gives them a kind of unique edge. The chip industry—perhaps the foundation of the tech world right now—is a rebuttal of that narrative.
The world is truly interdependent in this area of critical technology. I understood that Taiwan and TSMC had a singular role in producing most of the world’s semiconductors, production of the specialized and cutting-edge chips we need today literally requires the cooperation of countries across the world (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, the Netherlands).
How unique and cutting-edge this technology is, plus how fast it’s moving. Only one company in the entire world can produce the machines to etch the transistor patterns onto the wafers (ASML). Only a few companies can produce the machines to actually fabricate the chips themselves. TSMC is the only company in the world that has the scale and expertise to meet the demand for the latest semiconductors. It’s not possible for someone to just steal the technology and set up their own shop.
Questions It Prompted
- What happens when there isn’t a foreseeable breakthrough in semiconductor design and Moore’s Law is no longer true?
- Will China as a competitor to the U.S. today follow the same trajectory as Japan did as a U.S. competitor in the 1980s?
- How much of the “Taiwan problem” is about semiconductors vs. everything else, from the U.S. foreign affairs perspective i? Is it 90% of the issue? 50%?
Who Should Read It
People interested in a wide-ranging, “inch deep and a mile wide” explanation of how the chip industry arose, what’s the current status of the industry, and how it relates to the U.S.-China relationship.
Verdict
6.5/10. Content is good, learned new things, but the book tries to cover too much in just 350 pages. I prefer more detail and depth on fewer things in my nonfiction. This one felt rushed and a bit too surface-level for me. Still glad I read it though.