Quotes About Technology

GlobalFoundries, as this new company that inherited AMD's fabs was known, entered

Within four years of the iPhone's launch, Apple was making over 60 percent of all the world's profits from smartphone sales, crushing rivals like Nokia and BlackBerry and leaving East Asian smartphone makers to compete in the low-margin market for cheap phones.

DARPA has funded research programs on "human-machine teaming," envisioning, for example, a piloted fighter jet flying alongside several autonomous drones that are an additional set of eyes and ears for the human pilot.

In the age of AI, it's often said that data is the new oil. Yet the real limitation we face isn't the availability of data but of processing power.

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

A facility to fabricate the most advanced logic chips costs twice as much as an aircraft carrier but will only be cutting-edge for a couple of years.

We're not running out of atoms," Keller has said. "We know how to print single layers of atoms.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil.

World War II was decided by steel and aluminum, and followed shortly thereafter by the Cold War, which was defined by atomic weapons. The rivalry between the United States and China may well be determined by computing power.

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

dynamic (due to the repeated charging) random access memory, or DRAM.

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.

Integrated circuits made up 15 percent of South Korea's exports in 2017; 17 percent of Singapore's; 19 percent of Malaysia's; 21 percent of the Philippines'; and 36 percent of Taiwan's. Made

As in Japan, therefore, Korea's tech companies emerged not from garages, but from massive conglomerates with access to cheap bank loans and government support.

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.

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 Russian chip industry faced humiliation of its own, with one fab reduced in the 1990s to producing tiny chips for McDonald's Happy Meal toys. The Cold War was over; Silicon Valley had won.

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.

staggering. 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.

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