MIT Technology Review, July/ August 2021 (I)

choi

I transcribe the two articles.

(1) Jeremy Hsu, The Great Chip Divide. vol 124, No 4, p 54.
https://www.technologyreview.com ... 1-apple-tsmc-intel/

Quote:

"A Year into the covid-19 pandemic [Apple's press release: 'Apple unleashes M1' on Nov 10, 2010], Apple commemorated the growing array of devices featuring its custom M1 chip with great fanfare. * * * Apple's custom-designed chip is the latest triumph for Moore's Law * * * The M1 packs 16 billion transistors on a microprocessor the size of a large postage stamp.  * * * But even as Apple celebrated the M1, the world was facing an economically devastating shortage of microchips, particularly the relatively cheap ones that make many of today's technologies possible.  Automakers have been shutting down assembly lines and laying off workers because they can't get enough $1 chips. Manufacturers have to resort to building vehicles without the chips necessary for navigation systems, digital rear-view mirrors, display touch screens, and fuel management systems.

"an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine that costs more than $100 million. Made solely by ASML in the Netherlands * * * EUV machines were first used in commercial chip production in 2018. * * * Apple's M1 chips, which was made by TSMC; it's [M1's] among the first generation of leading-age chips to rely fully on EUV. * * * 'The only company that is actually using EUV in high volume is Apple, and they sell $1,100 smartphones for which they have insane margin,' [David] Kanter[, executive director of an open engineering consortium focused on machine learning,]  says.  Not only re the fabs for manufacturing such chips expensive, but the cost of designing the immensely complex circuits is now beyond the reach of many companies. In addition to Apple, only the largest tech companies that require the highest computing performance, such as Qualcomm, AMD, and Nvidia, are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to design a chip for leading-edge nodes, says Sri Samavedam, senior vice president of CMOS [standing for: complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor] technologies at Imec, an international research institute in Leuven, Belgium.

"An estimated 75% of all chip manufacturing capacity was based on East Asia as of 2019, with the US share sitting at approximately 13%.

"The White House photo ops with the president [Biden, calling for $50 billion investment] * * * The US government became 'the [Silicon] Valley's first, and perhaps its greatest, venture capitalist, [Margaret] O'Mara[, a historian at the University of Washington in Seattle,] wrote in her 2019 book The Code; Silicon Valley and the remaking of America. Large government order for chips to supply NASA's Apollo program encouraged chipmakers to begin mass production and helped lower the costs of the first silicon chips from $1,000 each in 1960 to just $25 by 1065.

Note:
(a) The article is locked behind paywall. There is no need to read the rest, though, which is insubstantial.
(b)
(i) For "White House photo ops," see Fact Sheet: The American Jobs Plan. Mar 31, 2021
https://www.whitehouse.gov/brief ... american-jobs-plan/
("While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic and delivering relief for working families, this is no time to build back to the way things were. This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy. The American Jobs Plan is an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China. * * * The President also is calling on Congress to invest $50 billion in semiconductor manufacturing and research, as called for in the bipartisan CHIPS Act")
(ii) Actually it is "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act" or the "CHIPS for America Act." US Senate passed the Act on June 8, 2021 but not the House. "Each year, Congress recesses for the month of August." www.senate.gov.