The geopolitics of chips: A manufacturing miracle
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This is the entire machine. wow. What do you think?

Tim is absolutely huge. In a factory near the city of untold in the netherlands, mark, a sink is showing me a machine, a gleaming hulk of pipes and metal the size of a double deck bus, nicknamed the beast.

The technical name is the E X C. Five thousand. So this is an E U. V machine. This is essentially the most advanced chip making machine in the world.

I think works for A S. M L, the dutch company that supplies machines to the global semiconductor industry. And the beast represents the absolute cutting edge of chip making technology available today.

We have the the light source, so that's where the U. V. Light is generated. IT has a huge length optical system, and because the length is getting bigger and bigger, the machine is getting bigger and bigger.

The beast is a pytheos phy machine. IT makes chips by tracing intricate patterns of transistors, tiny electrical switches onto pieces of silicon using light. And the scale at which this machine does that is nothing short of a technological miracle. IT creates microscopic transistors measuring just eight manometer that's thousands of times smaller than a human cell, or only three or four times bigger than the winds of a strand of human DNA. And this means you can fit tens of billions of these transistors onto a piece of silicone bigger than your thumb, creating the most powerful and advanced chips in the world.

Everything is at the edge of what is possible is the immense accuracy y of the system we are measuring with the precision of a few items. They're really pushing the limited.

pushing the loss of physics. The result is that if you want to make the most advanced computer chips in the world today, you need a machine like the beast. A machine that raise as much as two airliners is made of tens of thousands of precision components, took nearly two decades to develop, costs almost four hundred million dollars to buy, and is only made by one company in the whole world. A, S, M, L, here in the arguably .

is the most complex system you can buy in series, right? You can debate about a, the large hadron provider, which is extremely complex. But this is A A box that you can essentially buy, and we believe it's the most complex system ever made.

This is tectonic from the financial times. I'm James king. There's a chip war going on, a battle over who gets to use and make the advanced semiconductors that power are phones, computers and the artificial intelligence systems of the future in this episode, the miracle of modern chip manufacturing, how making computer chips became one of the most complex and sophisticated processes in the world, and why that has put chips at the heart of the tech war between the united states and china.

Today's computer chips are the product of more than sixty years of constant innovation. Back in the mid sixties, when semiconductors were in their infancy, gordon Moore, the co founder of intel, notice a trend. The first chips in the early sixties had featured just a handful of transistors linked together, but every year engineers were fitting more and more transistors onto pieces of silicon, meaning that every year the chips were getting more powerful.

Bird Moore was really our technology leader from the beginning of this company. He was, you always viewed as, as the technology grow up the company.

Sanjay na. Rogen leads technology research at intel today.

Sixty years ago. At this point, he wrote a paper, a very short for page paper, and he observed in that paper that what he called number of components on a chip were doubling every year. And that's really the gist of the paper.

The observation became known as mos law.

Side point, gorden Moore never actually liked that. He never liked the law being named after him, but the named stuck. And then he kind of added more data as the years went by.

And then he said, that seems to be doubling every two years. And that was kind of the final answer on mores law. The number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

Moore couldn't have guessed ted at the time, but his observation helped define the entire chip industry. For the next sixty years, the whole industry has made IT its mission to keep mos law going, producing chips that get progressively more complex and more powerful.

It's pretty important to point out that it's not a law in any physical sense or scientific sense. IT really was just an observation. And really what that turned into is almost marching orders for the entire semiconductor industry to keep that trend going, not just intel, but I have to say the entire industry worldwide has been marching to the drumbeat. And what IT has created for the world is nothing short of amazing.

The success of mos law meant that every couple of years, the chip industry could deliver the same computing power in smaller and smaller packages, powering a revolution in computing.

If you imagine, fifty years ago, computers were enormous. They were in air condition room. They were only available to a very small number of users, are generally business or government users.

And now everyone has that exact supercomputer from fifty years ago. Everyone has one of those in their pocket today. Those computers have gotten thousands of times faster. They're consuming thousands of times less energy. They've gotten significantly smaller and theyve gotten far more affordable when there's countless examples of the way that technology that mores law has guided us to has really revolutionized the world.

Broadly speaking, mos law has continued to hold to this day. One of the first integrated circuits developed in the early sixties featured four transistors. Today, the first nail sized chip in a high and smart phone contains tens of billions of them.

So let you've seen the chip. Have you've seen the chip? yes. yeah.

Back at A S. M, L. In the netherlands, mark, a sink shows me what the result of decades of morals law looks like.

So this, this is the chip out of my son's iphone, right?

Okay.

this is an extremely complex thing, right about, yeah, what is IT a finger ill? I would say, my wife, finger square, square. yeah.

And so IT looks like a very small black plastic singing, but inside is like an apartment building at this, over one hundred layers with tiny structures and the bottom layer wall's transistors, switches, I would say. And this one has about twenty billion switches in this device. So it's like twenty billion light switches, and it's connecting these transistors such that that defines the functionality of the chip.

And those twenty billion transistors would fit on the chip the size of a feral.

And in fact, gordon Moore predicted at every two years, IT would basically double. So in two years, we would go to forty billion.

In fact, there are already chips out there with far more. For example, apple's m2 ultra chip， used to power desk top computers, has a hundred and thirty four billion transistors. And the latest AI chip from NVIDIA harness is the power of more than two hundred billion. But key to that relentless progress has been the ability of the industry to make transistors aller and smaller. And that's where companies like A, S, M, L, which supply the machines to every high and chip factory in the world, come in.

If we can make a device, machine tool that can print smaller transistors, you can put more transistors in the same package, right? Smaller means more.

and after sixty years of morals law, the scientific and technological chAllenge of making microscopic transistors even smaller has become immense.

You should. You should. Is the beach .

honestly just lew us away and just, yeah, we saw the beast.

I dare to say that the latest and create machine we have built, the high evy machine, is the most complex machine ever built by mankind, more complex than the first moon lender.

In an office above A S M S. Factory floor, I met your spend shop, the company's executive vice president for technology. He was working for the dutch company, phillip PS, in the mid nineteen and eighties, when A S M L was spun off as a separate company, initially housed in a few prefab buildings.

There is a very nice picture of some wooden shots in front of the phillips building. And indeed, this is where the asia male employee, just over thirty of them, were a host. And there's a big do so with junk next to this porter cabins. IT really look and felt like you started at a time.

Advances in a sls lathom phy machines have been central to keeping mos law going lithography tracing intricate patterns of transistors using light has been used in chip making for decades. To make transistors on a microscopic scale, you need very short wavelengths of light. And until a few years ago, the most advanced chips were made using deep ultraViolet light or D U V. But around the turn of the millennium um the industry was worried D U V light wouldn't be able to make the next generation of computer chips. The wavelength of the light was simply too big to print transistors with enough detail.

Fact is very simple, basic physics, the smaller the wavelength, the smaller you can print future.

So ben shop and his team at A S M L began developing lithography machines that used extreme ultraViolet light, or E U V light, which had an even shorter wave link, so IT could print with an even finer resolution. But IT turned out that building an E U V machine was incredibly difficult with several huge scientific and technological obstacles to overcome.

The number one, top number one for many, many years was the E V source to generate light of a waverings of thirteen nomex, thirteen point five anomalous.

How do you make E U V light? They settled on lasting, tiny drop lets of tin with you shoot a thirty .

micron thin rubber t, which is the thickness ness of a human hair. Roughly, you shooting with fifty meters per second into a vacuum festival, and you have to head IT deal with a high power laser.

Then they needed a series of mirrors to control the beam of light, but these mirrors needed to be almost impossibly flat to make sure the light could be focused with atomic accuracy.

Y, A, to give an idea, you have to make a mirror with of a Peter that is shaped with atomic position, with point one than a metre accuracy, which is listen. So to make a mass scope. C objects with atomic position will always considered to be near to impossible. After years of delay, we finally corrected through a combination of hard work, science and look .

IT took A S, M, L, seventeen years of work and more than six billion euros in research and development build the E, U, V machines. But the new machines meant that the semicon inductor industry could create chips with a higher density of transistors than ever before. Today, all of the most advanced chips in the world are made with an E, U, V machine, and the only company in the world that can make those machines A S, M.

L. There are no other competitors in the market. I asked your spend shop how IT could happen, that the whole advanced chip making industry today could be entirely dependent on A S M. L. For such a crucial piece of manufacturing technology.

We are very focused on one thing, we build these machines. The second thing is our commitment to technology is not that many companies that have to stema to stand behind the decision for two decades, while IT continues to be delayed. But there is also an element.

As a physicist, I have to come back to the economics. There has been consolidation, and industry for economic reasons is nothing else. This is demand for U. V. machines. But, uh, the investment are enormous.

So you can have one company investing ten billion and enjoy the majority of the market or you give three companies each invest in ten billion competing for the same market. IT simply doesn't add up. So it's it's a little bit when he takes all you know, we became to the finish line first. So it's a race. Where's ongoing consolidation also at our customers, you see the semon doctor makers are also consolidating the reason to consolidate its economies.

Ben shop is right that there is a consolidation across the semiconductor industry, particularly when IT comes to making the most advanced chips. Ssl is the only company in the world that makes U. V machines.

Just a handful of companies know how to use the machines, including intel in the us, samsung in korea, and most importantly, T, S, M, C, which uses A S, M, L machines to make ninety percent of the world's most advanced chips in taiwan. This consolidation, with the whole of advanced chip making reliant on just a few crucial companies, is a result of the success of morals law. Making advanced chips with billions of microscopic transistors is so difficult, only a few companies in the world can do IT, and this highly consolidated industry is what's being fought in the cheap war.

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The money, time, effort and expertise you now need to make the world's most advanced chips has created a vast global network of companies, each with a vital role to play in the chip making process. And this consolidated supply chain is at the heart of the battle between the us and china.

When you look at the chip industry, there are a series of choke points.

Chris Miller is the author of chip war, the fight for the world's most critical technology in lithography.

For example, there is just one firm that can produce the most advanced methods, phy system. The same is true for many of the types of tools that are used and ship making. One or two firms are capable of cutting edge production. If you want to design an advanced ship, there are three firms which you are almost inevitably going to buy, a chip making software international property from thirty years ago, there used to be a couple dozen chip manufacturer who could produce cutting edge chips, and today is just a handful of firms that are capable producing the most advanced ships. And of those, the vast majority are produced by just one firm, taiwan's t.

These choke points are behind a lot of the anxiety that the U. S, in particular has about chips. IT makes the industry vulnerable. If you lose a crucial company in the chain, the whole supply of chips is disrupted.

The fact that more than ninety percent of advanced chips are made by T, S, M, C in a handful of plants in taiwan is the main reason that the U. S. Government is currently spending tens of billions of dollars to encourage advances semiconductor factories to set up shop on U.

S. Soil instead, but it's also given the U. S. An opportunity to stop its chief technology rival, china from getting hold of advanced chips.

There's a fundamental irony behind all the progress the ship industry has delivered, which is that is required, the concentration that today makes the united states very nervous, but is also used this fact, concentration of the industry, as well as the link finning supply chains, so limit the types of technologies that can be transferred to china, even for companies that aren't based in the united states.

The U. S, has successfully pressured T, S, M, C to stop making high and chips for chinese companies, effectively cutting china off from the advanced chip industry, and in order to stop china making its own ships, it's land on the dutch government to stop A S M L from selling its most advanced ethos phy machines to chinese factories. Combine that with a ban on companies like in videos selling advanced A I chips in the chinese market.

And the U. S. Has succeeded in almost completely starving china of the chips that needs to develop the latest technology.

If you can't produce twenty twenty four cutting edge ships, or at least something very, very close, your ability to develop expensive products or more importantly, your ability to train cutting edge AI systems is going to be extraordinary, limited. And so the us. And its allies are betting that it'll be able to stay meaningfully ahead of china thanks to morals law, and that its restrictions will therefore limit the ability of china to develop from the capabilities that us security officials are most worried about.

There is a lot of debate over whether china is overtaking the us as a tech super power, but access to advance chips is the one area where the U. S. Still has a clear lead, and IT may be decisive in who emerges as the leader in technologies like artificial intelligence.

China would like to catch up, but the U. S. Embargo is just half the problem. The fact that the industry is relentlessly driven forward by mos law makes IT seem much more difficult for china to gain ground.

If china throw the state's huge resources that making its own A I chip, for example, by the time they had achieved this, the rest of the industry would have moved on to even more advanced chips. The cutting edge of chip technology is a constantly moving finish line. In this sense, the U.

S. Has a particular interest in keeping mos law going. As long as chips keep getting more and more advanced, the U. S. Can maintain its chipley over china. But the extremes that the industry now has to go to, to make more and more advances chips, begs the question for how long can mos law keep going?

For years, researchers have worried that we may be fast approaching some kind of physical limit to the number of transistors you can freeze onto a chip. Back in two thousand and three, gordon more himself warned that no exponential change continues forever. Today, transistors are so small that they are made up of only a few dozen items of silicon.

If they keep shrinking them, what happens when you reach one atom? And even before you get to that physical barrier, strange quanto effects will start to disrupt the working of chips when they constructed on such a tiny atomic scale. Does that worry your spend shop at A S.

M L? I mean, generally speaking, you fulfilled mores law over a number of years. But how? How small can you go?

There's always a question, when do I get smaller than an item? I'm gonna show you something the listings can read IT. But I took the international technology of man for semiconductor.

I just extrapolated IT. I will be one hundred and five by the time you hit an F, M, which is twenty six, sixty five. So i'm very calm. We have tens of billion transistors on the advanced p and in fact, the expectation of the industry is to reach a trillion transistors in a single package by two and three.

In reality, though, the chip industry is already focusing less on the further shrinking of transistors and more on other ways to increase the power of chips and keep delivering the benefits of mos law.

the death of morals law has been predicted for almost as long as it's been around.

Sanjay, not a rogan at intel, sees his mission as working to continue most law. But he says these days, that's less about the transition density of the chip. I'm more about the computing power the chip delivers however it's made.

If we redefine the notion of more laws, continue to the deliver energy fishing and cost efficient computing to the world, we see that the future remains bright. We may move away from the number of transistors on a chip more towards, for example, advanced packaging, like making a product out of several smaller chips. We call them chip, lets each sort of purpose optimized for its function. That may be the one of the next generations of morals. Law evolution is we move into a very advanced packaging realm, and we delivered red that moves law value to the end user at that way.

So would IT be an over simplification then to say the next generation of mos law would be a shift away from just increasing the number of transistors on a chip to using different methods such as designing IT differently?

I do think the number of transistors on a chip are gonna continue to increase where lithography road map continues to have very good options. So I think at the core mores law and miniature zia, we will continue to see improvements. But in the sense or absolutely games, we're onna also see part of the heavy lifting done by other aspects, design, advanced packaging.

These are all gone. Onna be core elements of that. My visibility is leading technology research rental is about ten years out. And in that ten year horizon, I see more than enough options that are disposal to continue more slow.

Should we care if mos law ends? We should care if mos .

law ends because IT implies that we are not going to continue to be able to deliver that kind of innovation, world changing, you know, health outcomes, lifestyle lifetime outcomes and human connection outcomes. We are not going to able to continue to deliver on that, that we have been for the past fifty years as stewards of more law. We really do feel the responsibility and take the responsibility seriously. We determined to continue, and we believe that that's something that is gone to change the lives of the eight billion people on this .

planet for the Better. Chis Miller, the author of chip war, is confident in the ingenuity of the industry to keep pushing the cutting edge of semiconductors forward. This is particularly true given the chips that will be needed to power the coming A I revolution.

Studying the history of the chip industry, I learned that it's never been the case that we know how will produce materia PS more than a decade out. The time horizon for companies is only five or utmost ten years.

And so whether you're standing in one thousand, nine hundred and sixty or nineteen eight or two thousand or the present, you never know how IT will be possible to deliver ongoing exponential increases for more than about a decade into the future, which is why throughout the history of the chip industry, the most eminent computer experts and industry leaders have, on a regular basis, predicted the end mos law in just about a decade. Gordon more himself, in two thousand and three, said he couldn't envision how more lake could persist for more than a decade. And here we are two decades later. And for my perspective, the rate has barely changed. And when I look at all of the money going into produce Better chips, Better designs, uh, Better manufacturing processes for the next generation of AI chips, IT seems to me foolish to bet against this extraordinary some of money and all these brilliant engineers trying to produce the next generation .

of advances the chip industry keeps driving forward in the relentless pursuit of Better chips. This is good news for the future development of technology, but it's also good news for the us two, in its efforts to maintain its advantage in chips over china for as long as the chip industry keeps making advances and for as long as the us. Can keep control over who has access to the cutting edge processes needed to make the latest chips.

The U. S. Can keep its chip lead and its position as a global tech superpower.

The united states has been betting on computing now for uh, seventy years, and so the U. S. Has been betting on mos law as companies have been betting on mos law and they have been delivering mos law, I think, for economic reasons, for technological reasons, but also for strategic reasons, the U. S. Is still betting on advancing computing undergraded its economic position as well as its strategic position.

In the next episode in this season of tectonic, I visit the most important choke point in the whole global chip industry, the island at the front line of the chip war, taiz .

for everybody, and everybody's a car using the chips from the factory that we are running .

over here in. They make more than ninety percent of the world's most advanced chips. They call the chip industry. The holy mountain that protects the nation but can IT protect taiwan from the near constant threat of a chinese invasion .

is our most important industry in 台湾。 Some of my foreign friend told me, if not for the semiconductor, most of the foreign company will not care if taiwan get taken over .

by china or not. And if this is true, tech tonic is presented by me. James king, our senior producer is Edwin lane, and our producer is josh gabbert. Dyle executive producer is manua sara gosa sound designed by brain Turner and sam geo vin kle, music by metaphor music. Our global head of audio is shero bromly.

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