The Asianometry Podcast

For a long time, the semiconductor industry's primary economic engine was Moore's Law. An internal benchmark of doubling the number of devices on an integrated chip every 18 months. Broadly speaking, three engines drove these advances. Semiconductor design, increasing wafer sizes, and lastly, lithography.  Improvements in optical lithography techniques have been the true driving force behind producing faster and faster chips. But coming up to the new millennium, it became clear to everyone that the lithographic train of progress was braking to a slow halt.  Was there enough left in the tank for one last ride?

Recently, the People's Republic of China banned the export of rare earth magnet production technologies for national security interest. Note, not the particular rare earth magnets themselves. The technologies that produce them. There are 18 rare earth elements - the 15 lanthanides as well as yttrium, scandium, and lutetium. They have wide technological and commercial uses. Most of these use cases are small - the OEC values global rare-earth metal compound trade volume in 2021 at about $2.7 billion - but they are vital. Thus why we call them the "vitamins" of the tech economy. But one use case in particular stands out to me over all the others: Magnets. And China's tech export actions hint at their strategic importance. In just a few years, China won a near-complete monopoly on the production of these unexpectedly critical magnet materials.

At its peak, Indonesia's Salim Group was a $22 billion giant - the country’s biggest business group. Its founder and top boss Liem Sioe Liong - also called Sudono Salim - was Southeast Asia's richest man.  Salim Group's incredible rise came on the back of the company’s personal connection to the authoritarian leader Suharto.  A personal friend of Liem, the dictator leaned on the company as one of its core collaborators.  Few companies dominated a single country like Salim's companies did Indonesia until the Asian Financial Crisis. This is its story. 

Building a few houses isn’t enough to make a neighborhood. You also need to build the roads and sidewalks to connect them. Same with an integrated circuit. You can stick a billion transistors on an IC, but they are useless if you cannot also connect them. That is what interconnects are for. They are wires for transmitting the electrical signals between transistors and other circuit elements. For over 30 years, we used to make these interconnects and their insulating layers from aluminium and silicon dioxide, respectively. But by the late 1990s, it became technically necessary to use new materials. Big technology transitions are opportunities for certain companies to pull ahead of the rest. In this case, that certain company was TSMC.

Americans invented the video magnetic tape recorder. But it was the Japanese who brought it to the masses as the VCR. Throughout the 1980s, virtually every home VCR sold in America was made in Japan. Even the ones sold by American brands like RCA. How did Japan come to dominate a device they didn’t create? Today, we are going to look at the rise and reign of Japanese VCRs.

In the 1980s, Brazil had a large domestic computer industry. Dozens of Brazilian-owned companies - employing tens of thousands of Brazilians - producing tens of thousands of Brazilian PCs. In the 1970s, a small set of Brazilian government bureaucrats recognized the growing importance of the computer industry. And in a bold move, they reserved the most exciting part of that market exclusively for Brazilian firms. These protections helped develop an industry ... but only for so long. In this video, we are going to review the Brazilian computer industry.

After 20+ years of development, extreme ultraviolet lithography has become a commercial reality. As I write these words, multi-million dollar machines from ASML use EUV light to create impossibly small patterns in wafers.  This technological magic requires a powerful heart inside of it. And indeed, there is an amazing system driving ASML's $150 million lithography machine: The EUV Light Source.  In this video, we are going to look at the lasers firing pulses at tin droplets to create the powerful, 13.5 nanometer wavelength light for our latest, greatest microprocessors. 

I want to thank Alex Sludds of MIT for his help on this video: https://alexsludds.github.io/

Silicon is probably the single most studied element on earth. Over the past seventy years, people have researched more ways to cut it, etch it, grind it, clean it, crystallize it, polish it than almost anything else.  Engineers have done amazing things to turn this plentiful shiny rock into the century’s most impactful piece of technology. And the wafer industry needs some love for those achievements.  So in this video, we are going to talk about the decades of research and stunning engineering that have gone into creating today’s cutting-edge semiconductor wafers. 

When we last left Nvidia, the company had emerged victorious in the brutal graphics card Battle Royale throughout the 1990s.  Very impressive. But as the company entered the 2000s, they embarked on a journey to do more. Moving towards an entirely new kind of microprocessor - and the multi-billion dollar market it would unlock.    In this video, we are going to look at how Nvidia turned the humble graphics card into a platform that dominates one of tech’s most important fields: Artificial Intelligence.

Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink. Humans need freshwater and getting enough of it is an ever-present challenge.  Yet the earth is covered in water! Over half of the planet is ocean! The problem of course is that you cannot drink it because it is too salty.  Desalination is the process of removing salts from salty sea and brackish water to produce freshwater. The goal is simple, but the technologies are complicated and energy intensive. And we often power these processes with oil.  Ideally, we do not want to burn any more fossil fuels to get this water. And that is why people sometimes want to use nuclear energy to power the whole process.

Japan's semiconductor story is unique in modern technology and business.  Coming out of World War II, the country rapidly gained competence in an emerging technology and became a global leader.  In this video, we look at the 30-year rise and peak of the Japanese semiconductor industry starting from the 1950s into the 1980s.

It is the purest water you will ever know. And every day, chip factories are sloshing their wafers with it. Ultrapure water or UPW is an industry term. A term that describes its product quite well. Water with purity requirements so strict, you're more likely to win the national lottery than to find a non-water molecule inside it.  Companies have contorted themselves into pretzels making ultrapure water. And the bar keep getting higher year after year. How pure can you possibly get? In this short video, we are going to look at how semiconductor companies make the world's purest water.

In 2011, then-President Barack Obama visited a General Electric or GE facility in the town of Schenectady, New York. There, he mostly discussed wind turbine exports. But he also briefly mentioned an "advanced battery" business with great promise.  Obama was referring to a molten salt stationary battery technology branded as Durathon. GE CEO Jeff Immelt believed that it will become a billion dollar business.  But Durathon fell far short. In 2015, the company closed its battery manufacturing factory in New York after investing nearly $200 million. Nearly a hundred people lost their jobs.  In this video, we are going to look at General Electric's failed molten salt battery business venture. 

In 1895, Japan acquired Taiwan island from the Qing Empire as their first colony. For the next fifty years, Japan occupied Taiwan - infusing it with their traditions, culture, and expertise.  The colonial legacy of the Japanese occupation period was deep and long lasting for both colonized and colonizer. In this video, we are going to talk about what happened during those fifty years. And what it did for both the Taiwanese and Japanese people.

One morning in September 1981, Malaysia conducted a financial dawn raid that stunned the British business community and reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres of Malaysian plantation land for Malaysia. In this video I want to talk about Malaysia’s strike against the remaining structures of the old colonial state.

Sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and yet we just can’t get enough of it.  In 2018, Singapore was the world's biggest importer of sand by value. Each year, the country consumes over 5 tons of sand per resident.  Over the past twenty years, they have imported over 500 million tons of sand.  And with these sand imports, Singapore has created massive amounts of wealth for itself and its people.  But the sand has to come from somewhere. Its mass removal has big environmental impacts, and has opened the country up to criticism.  But is it even possible to replace sand? That’s what we are going to talk about in this video. 

Contemporary Amperex Technologies or CATL is China's leading EV battery supplier. As of this writing, it is the only Chinese EV battery company that has begun to export its products abroad.  It is interesting to consider that one of China's most valuable companies makes, of all things, batteries. When we think about high value add, technically complicated things, we think about iPhones or other tech. Not exactly batteries.  But as it turns out, batteries are surprisingly complicated to make. In this video, we are going to look at how CATL manufactures one of their EV batteries.

At the turn of the century, the $200 billion semiconductor manufacturing industry across the globe joined hands and underwent a massive transition. Maybe the last of its kind.  That transition? They made their wafers larger.  Sounds simple right? But the 300 millimeter wafer transition started in 1994, took nearly a decade, and cost the industry billions of dollars.

In 1986, the Soviet Union had slightly more than 10,000 computers. The Americans had 1.3 million.  At the time of Stalin's death, the Soviet Union was the world's third most proficient computing power. But by the 1960s, the US-Soviet computing gap was already years long. Twenty years later, the gap was undeniable and basically permanent.  Why did this happen? The Soviet state believed in science and industrial modernization. Support for research & development and the hard sciences were plentiful. They had the country’s finest minds.  Goodness gracious, they launched Sputnik! They landed on Venus! How did it come to this?