Quotes from Chris Miller

By the end of the 1980s, a chip with a million transistors—unthinkable in the early 1970s, when Lynn Conway had arrived in Silicon Valley—had become a reality, when Intel announced its 486 microprocessor, a small piece of silicon packed with 1.2 million microscopic switches.

Haggerty and Kilby realized that light rays and photoresists could solve the mass-production problem, mechanizing and miniaturizing chipmaking in

The greatest beneficiary of the rise of foundries like TSMC was a company that most people don't even realize designs chips: Apple. The company Steve Jobs built has always specialized in hardware, however, so it's no surprise that Apple's desire to perfect its devices includes controlling the silicon inside.

Sobchak did not abandon the city's democratic institutions, but after his election, the former law professor focused his efforts on strengthening law enforcement and tax collection. He turned to his former student in the law faculty at Leningrad State University, Vladimir Putin, for help.

The scientific networks that produced EUV spanned the world, bringing together scientists from countries as diverse as America, Japan, Slovenia, and Greece. However, the manufacturing of EUV wasn't globalized, it was monopolized. A single supply chain managed by a single company would control the future of lithography.

For every major chip firm, the Chinese consumer market is far more important a customer than the U.S. government.

but the consensus in Washington was that trade and investment would encourage China to become a "responsible stakeholder" of the international system, as influential diplomat Robert Zoellick put it.

If Facebook's fancy headquarters were to sink into the San Andreas Fault, the company might barely notice. If TSMC's fabs were to slip into the Chelungpu Fault, whose movement caused Taiwan's last big earthquake in 1999, the reverberations would shake the global economy.

Run faster" was an elegant strategy with only a single problem: by some key metrics, the U.S. wasn't running faster, it was losing ground. Hardly anyone in government bothered to do the analysis

The largest analog chipmaker today is Texas Instruments

It was hard enough to design chips in normal times. Doing so while battling the KGB was impossible. A

but remains a medium-sized, highly profitable chipmaker with a vast catalog of analog chips and sensors.

China's import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil or Germany's export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

It was hard enough to design chips in normal times. Doing so while battling the KGB was impossible.

the two main types of memory chip—DRAM and NAND—are produced by only a couple of firms.

Micron's long string of acquisitions left it with DRAM fabs in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore as well as in the United States. Government subsidies in countries like Singapore encouraged Micron to maintain and expand fab capacity there.

Chip sales to the Apollo program transformed Fairchild from a small startup into a firm with one thousand employees. Sales ballooned from $500,000 in 1958 to $21 million two years later.

The market for NAND, the other main type of memory chip, is also Asia-centric. Samsung, the biggest

in recent years is the collapse in the share of logic chips produced in the United States.

Real men" might have fabs, but Silicon Valley's new wave of semiconductor entrepreneurs didn't.

Nvidia's GPUs can render

images quickly because, unlike Intel's microprocessors or other general-purpose CPUs, they're structured to conduct lots of simple calculations—like shading pixels—simultaneously.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

One U.S. senator has described Russia as "a gas station masquerading as a country"—and indeed, oil and gas play as large a role as ever.