{"id":9368,"date":"2021-07-16T20:40:51","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T20:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thejetboy.com\/?p=9368"},"modified":"2021-08-01T21:38:41","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T21:38:41","slug":"the-geopolitics-of-chips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejetboy.com\/the-geopolitics-of-chips\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of chips!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>6 Minute, 38 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n

As aerospace engineers, we pride ourselves on making some awe-inspiring stuff, giant rockets taller than skyscrapers, aircraft that are as big as a football field, and if, we fail explosions that can take down the entire city block. But after graduating as an aerospace engineer, I somehow started working at a company that believes in “Changing the world, one nanometer at a time.” making machines that go kaput (minus the spectacular explosion) if so much as a spec of dust enters it. So like any other sane person, I was questioning my life choices. Trying to understand what is it that I really do? and how does it fit into the big picture? What I found was more mind-blowing than a 1000 pound JDAM<\/a> and maybe even the driving force behind it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basics:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Not so long ago, the words wafers and chips had the same meaning for me as they did for most humans, I ate them as snacks. But apparently, they also form the backbone of the tech industry. A wafer is a disc of silicon on which chips are printed, and silicon chips are the things that power all our hi-tech devices and lifestyle. While most of us are customers of the chip consumers, we know very little about the companies that enable their design and manufacturing. For example, did you know that both the memory card and RAM of your iPhone and MacBooks are made by Samsung? Or Intel is struggling to manufacture its next generation of chips, which perhaps will be manufactured by a little-known company called TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). Or maybe that TSMC is reliant on another little-known company called ASML (It is just ASML) to manufacture the machines that can help it manufacture the next generation of chips, confused? Let us get to the basics first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our hi-tech world can be classified into four main categories, chip consumers, designers, foundries, and manufacturers. We are all aware of the consumers we consume from the consumers of the hi-tech world. All the fancy ML\/AI and stuff like that originate here but are powered by the companies in the other three categories. Enter the chip designers, these are the companies that design the chips that enable the consumers to run all their fancy codes, stuffing in as many transistors as they can inside the chip. However, the designers mostly create computer models of the chips and require the foundries and manufacture to bring them to life. Enter the two least known categories of the hi-tech world, which is run by a symbiotic relationship between two companies TSMC and ASML, situated in two corners of the world. Headquartered in cities with less than 500,000 (Hsinchu) and 250,000 (Eindhoven) people respectively, these two companies together control\/influence more than 50% of the world’s chip-making industry, and if not for the chip shortage and trade war, we probably would have never heard of them. But how do these two companies do that? Enter the sci-fi-like technology that goes behind these machines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Global share of foundries as per country and companies. [1]<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Technology:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We have all heard of Moore’s law<\/a>, but in order to achieve that target, the transistors on a chip need to keep getting smaller and smaller. At present we have reached a level where the transistors are only a few times the size of a silicon atom and it’s getting nearly impossible to shrink them to a smaller size. While finding a way to shrink them further is a problem for another day, manufacturing the present generation of cutting-edge chips is a completely different ball game on its own. Enter ASML and TSMC, with their chip-making expertise and this new way of producing those chips called EUV Lithography<\/a>. How crazy is this chip-making thing, think about high-powered laser shooting through tin droplets creating plasma traveling through a vacuum all to print a tiny dot (transistor) on a silicon disc. Machines that weigh tonnes and are meters wide but everything in them is calculated to the seventh decimal place and accurate to the millimeter (or more). Built using technology that can put rocket science to shame and in a facility that is 10,000 times cleaner than the ambient atmosphere. Technology that is so critical, the US government is using all its muscles sanctioning its allies and preventing them from selling these machines to the Chinese. Can I give you more details about how the machine works? Perhaps, but then I would have to kill you  \ud83d\ude09. So, we will be ending this section with a cut section of the ASML EUV NXE 3X00 series of machines and a picture of a TSMC fab with these machines, you can reach out if you have questions. But for now, we will be zooming out of the tech and machines to understand the geopolitical influence these chips have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n