Quotes from Chris Miller

Today, no company besides TSMC has the skill or the production capacity to build the chips Apple needs. So the text etched onto the back of each iPhone—"Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China"—is highly misleading. The iPhone's most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.

As investors bet that data centers will require ever more GPUs, Nvidia has become America's most valuable semiconductor company.

Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon "the formula of 'the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported' " and replace it with " 'the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.

In the chip industry, by lowering startup costs, Chang's foundry model gave birth to dozens of new "authors"—fabless chip design firms—that transformed the tech sector by putting computing power in all sorts of devices.

Bell Labs soon began arranging patent applications for this new device.

Shockley was furious that his colleagues had discovered an experiment to prove his theories, and he was committed

a then-unknown engineer named Ren Zhengfei established an electronics trading company called Huawei.

possible to run any AI algorithm on a general-purpose CPU, but the scale of computation required for AI makes using CPUs prohibitively

new type of transistor, made up of three chunks of semiconductor material.

He could turn the larger current on and off by manipulating the small current applied to the middle of this transistor sandwich.

Chips optimized for AI can work faster, take up less data center space, and use less power than general-purpose Intel CPUs.

To learn to recognize images of cats, a CPU would process pixel after pixel, while a GPU could "look" at many pixels at once. So the time needed to train a computer to recognize cats decreased dramatically.

Shockley Semiconductor in the San Francisco suburb of Mountain View, California, just down the street from Palo Alto

he wondered how to reduce the number of wires that were needed to string different transistors together. Rather than use a separate piece of silicon or germanium to build each

he thought of assembling multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor

Bob Noyce, the leader of the "traitorous eight," who had a charismatic, visionary enthusiasm for microelectronics and an intuitive sense of which technical advances were needed to make transistors tiny, cheap, and

Unlike oil, though, the supply of chips is monopolized by China's geopolitical rivals.

Ultimately, Zeiss created mirrors that were the smoothest objects ever made, with impurities that were almost imperceptibly small. If the mirrors in an EUV system were scaled to the size of Germany, the company said, their biggest irregularities would be a tenth of a millimeter. To direct EUV light with precision, they must be held perfectly still, requiring mechanics and sensors so exact that Zeiss boasted they could be used to aim a laser to hit a golf ball as far away as the moon.

Kilby called his invention an "integrated circuit," but it became known colloquially as a "chip," because each integrated circuit was made from a piece of silicon "chipped" off a circular silicon wafer.

This method of depositing protective layers avoided exposing materials to air and impurities that could cause defects. It was a major advance in reliability

miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination:

The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world's second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

Lathrop applied for a patent on the technique in 1957. With the Army band playing, the military gave him a medal for his work and a $25,000 cash bonus, which he used to buy his family a Nash Rambler station wagon.

Members of Congress would no doubt have been furious had they learned that DARPA—ostensibly a defense agency—was wining and dining professors of computer science as they theorized about chip design. But it was efforts like these that shrank transistors, discovered new uses for semiconductors, drove new customers to buy them, and funded the subsequent generation of smaller transistors. When it came to semiconductor design, no country in the world had a better innovation ecosystem.