Taiwan has a sacred mountain for chip-making
Bringing Chip Manufacturing back to the U.S.: How Gina Raimondo Helped in Closing the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Coalition
The point is that if we push the boundaries of physics and materials science to cram more transistors onto a chip, it will make it harder for any one country or company to excel at all the parts of the design and manufacturing. You require the whole coalition. Every member of the coalition trusts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with its most intimate trade secrets and that’s the reason it is the premier chip manufacturer in the world.
Beijing is left trying to emulate the world’s all-star chip stack on its own, because it isn’t trusted to not steal intellectual property from their coalition partners. It managed to pilfer a certain amount of chip technology, including 28 nanometer technology from TSMC back in 2017.
I talked to Gina Raimondo, who serves as Secretary of Commerce, about the new export controls on chips and how she has been able to help bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.
She said that the U.S. was in an unfortunate position. We purchased 100 percent of our advanced logic chips from abroad, with 10 percent coming from Korea. (That IS pretty crazy, but it IS true.)
How Much is a Quintillion? Lauren Goode: A Story that I Studyed in the Bath Bath, I’ll Talk to Virginia Heffernan
Lauren Goode: One thing that we learned from your story is that you took it in the bathtub, so I printed it out here.
I enjoyed every second of it, it’s 43 pages. And one thing I learned from reading your story is the importance of photolithography and the process of making semiconductors. Can you quickly talk us through how that works? And also, I’m very curious, how much is a quintillion? I would like to know. I saw that word I thought to myself, “I’m not going to look it up, I’m just going to ask Virginia tomorrow.”
Lauren Goode is a person. So this is in reference to the sentence, “Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries, the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan, carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple.” I read that and thought about what it means. We know now. OK, but back to the photolithography. Why is this so important? What does this process do?
Virginia Heffernan: Well, all right. When people first started making chips in the US, they could fit four transistors on them. So first, you had these switches basically that have a bunch of wires around them, and they’re connected to another switch with a bunch of wires, and it conducts electricity among them. Someone has a bright idea that involves using a small amount of Silicon underneath some switches to make them talk to each other in a semiconductivity way, and it’s four. OK? “You can shrink those transistors down a little bit here and there.” They begin to realize that. And it starts to—at some point it doubles. Gordon Moore said, “From what I’ve experienced, this will double about every year, possibly every two years.” That is Moore’s law. Since then we’ve been getting smaller, as if we were playing a game of chessboard with double the grain of rice. This goes fast. So you went from four transistors in the early ’60s to now trillions on the same size, thumbnail chip. You have trillions of transistors on something that’s small. How in the world do you do that? Well, you’re no longer using wax, which they used in the beginning, or a knife or a carving tool to do lithography like you’d do with Batik. There would be places that it wouldn’t pass through if you put the ink down. The knife gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes light and a laser beam, and then the light gets more and more precise as it moves up the spectrum. You know, there’s slow, low,loping wavelengths down here. There’s radio, radio waves all the way up to past the visible spectrum to gamma rays. There are both X-rays and microwaves on the far right. Extreme ultraviolet little knives are used, not the smallest but very small precise wavelengths, and they are now at ultraviolet. That’s the knife they use now, and that is what they do with lithography. So you picture Batik or some other kind of art lithography, done smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller until you are dealing with electrons and lasers and light waves and atoms, and that’s how you get a trillion objects on your thumbnail. They are smaller than the coronaviruses. When I started writing, the transistors could fit around 11 billion on. A few years ago, I took that figure from a book. They had one with a billion by the time I finished writing. That’s what frequent doubling will do for you. And you can begin to taste the mind-blowingness of this, just … Lauren, you’re smiling right now. I don’t know what it is, but when I think about atoms, it’s a very rare smile that a person gets. It’s like you’re in another world. There’s atoms in everything, all mass. It’s just so cool and—
