Quotes About Innovation

Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year. Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips. The Dutch company ASML builds 100 percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC's 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.

DRAM circuits were carved into silicon. They didn't need to be weaved by hand, so they malfunctioned

Around a quarter of the chip industry's revenue comes from phones; much of the price of a new phone pays for the semiconductors inside. For the past decade, each generation of iPhone has been powered by one of the world's most advanced processor chips. In total, it takes over a dozen semiconductors to make a smartphone work, with different chips managing the battery, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular network connections, audio, the camera, and more.

Fabricating and miniaturizing semiconductors has been the greatest engineering challenge of our time. Today, no firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

Last year, the chip industry produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history. Nothing else comes close.

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It's driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

The world's chip industry, as well as the assembly of all the electronic goods chips enable, depends more on the Taiwan Strait and the South China coast than on any other chunk of the world's territory except Silicon Valley.

small, nimble organizations like DARPA that were empowered to take big bets on futuristic technologies

China had driven U.S. solar panel manufacturing out of business. Couldn't it do the same in semiconductors? "This

Lynn Conway, a computer architect at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where the concept of the personal computer with a mouse and a keyboard was just then being invented.

they began discussing how to standardize chip design. Why couldn't you program a machine to design circuits, they wondered. "Once you can write a program to do something," Mead declared, "you don't need anybody's tool kit, you write your own.

Conway and Mead

paving the way for computer programs to automate chip design.

globalization" of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; "Taiwanization

Mead-Conway Revolution" than the Pentagon.

Intel decided to focus on memory chips, where mass production would produce economies of scale.

Helping companies and professors keep Moore's Law alive, DARPA reasoned, was crucial to America's military edge.

built by alumni of these DARPA- and SRC-funded programs.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends

Qualcomm—quality communications—betting that ever-more-powerful microprocessors would let them stuff more signals into existing spectrum bandwidth. Jacobs

Semiconductors weren't simply the "cornerstone" of "everything we're competing on," as one administration official had put it. They could also be a devastatingly powerful weapon.

We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.

produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history. Nothing else comes close.

there's now a new instruction set architecture called RISC-V that is open-sourced, so it's available to anyone without a fee.