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Coincidentally, I had three pieces about semiconductors lined up in my reading list last week, offering a fascinating crash course in chip production and the geopolitics that come with it. If, like me, you’re only vaguely familiar with the topic, here are some snippets to make you curious:
First, this interview with Chris Miller, author of the book Chip War, lays the groundwork, explaining how omnipresent and indispensable semiconductors are:
“We think of chips as being in smartphones or being in PCs, but today, they’re in almost any device with an on/off switch. A new car will have a thousand chips inside of it, your refrigerator, your microwave, your dishwasher – all of our devices are full of chips that do computing and do sensing, increasingly do communication. And so the modern economy just can’t function without lots and lots of chips.”
“Advanced semiconductors today have millions or often billions of these tiny circuits [called transistors] etched into them that provide the 1’s and 0’s that modern computing requires. … just the primary chip in an iPhone will have around 15 billion transistors on it. They’re measured in a number of nanometres, which is a billionth of a metre. These are the smallest devices that humans have ever mass produced. And we produce more of them than we’ve produced any other device in human history.”
He explains that in the past we could use visible light to project the patterns and interact with chemicals in specific ways to carve these transistors onto chips. But because today’s chips are so incredibly tiny, a new type of lithography is required to make this process much more precise. The lithography machines that can do this “are the most complex machines humans have ever made. They require one of the most powerful lasers that has ever been deployed in a commercial device. They have an explosion happening inside of them at 40 or 50 times hotter than the surface of the sun.”
There is only one company in the world capable of building these lithography machines, called ASML based in the Netherlands. This short Bloomberg piece offers some some astonishing details:
“In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine. … Its next contraption, about the size of an Amsterdam studio apartment, is set to hit markets in 2025. With a price tag of more than $380 million – costlier than a Boeing 787 Dreamliner – it will be capable of etching delicate patterns on silicon wafers smaller than a virus. … EUV lithography uses light of a shorter wavelength to allow chipmakers to cram exponentially higher numbers of transistors into integrated circuits to make powerful chips. … The gigantic EUV machine, about the size of a school bus when fully assembled at a customer’s site, takes three to four Boeing 747s to deliver. Weighing 180 metric tons, it consists of more than 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables and 40,000 screws, and requires more than 2 km of hoses.”
ASML’s biggest customer is a Taiwanese company called TSMC which produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips – used in everything from Apple devices to cell phone towers to fighter jets. I’m yet to finish the widely shared Wired piece I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory which gives a rare look inside TSMC. It is perhaps one of most critical manufacturing sites for sustaining modern economies, highlighting our dependency on a handful of countries for the supply of critical materials and production facilities.
It’s easy to forget how much these tiny wafers affect not just our personal lives but the functioning of society. The complexity of chip production truly boggles the mind. Semiconductors represent both the pinnacle of humanity’s technical ingenuity and the ultimate weaponisation of the global supply chain. – Kai
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Your Product Management PodcastSPONSOR
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Figuring out product management together
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Apps & Sites
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Privacy-first Google Workplace alternative
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I’m surprised I hadn’t come across Skiff sooner. The suite of apps positions itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google Workplace. It includes end-to-end (open-sourced) encrypted email, calendar, documents, and files – powered by a full range of iOS and macOS apps. The free plan comes with 10 GB of storage, but paid plans are competitively priced, especially for B2B customers. Friends of DD enjoy a 50% discount on paid plans.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Virtual mechanical keyboard
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If you can’t get enough of the sound of mechanical keyboards, let Klack emulate the sound on your existing Mac keyboard. You can choose between different clacky sounds – preview them on the website.
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There are lots of AI tools emerging that summarise long texts. AudioPen does this for audio messages. You verbally record your thoughts and AudioPen then ‘translates’ them into a shortened written version.
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I’m intrigued by this high-quality shortfilm series that explores the concepts of rewilding and deep ecology. Episode #1 presents a definition of ‘rewilding’ and episode #2 goes into some of Europe’s last remaining ‘primary forests’. Subscribe to their newsletter to be notified of new episodes.
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Worthy Five: Marcella Chamorro
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A question worth asking:
‘What is my ideal life?’ That question is a shortcut to connecting with your values, passions and goals, and can help you make decisions and take actions that align with what you truly want. Plus, envisioning that ideal life can be a great motivator – and fun, too.
A concept worth understanding:
Failure comes with very uncomfortable emotions, but, funnily enough, learning to manage them is crucial to succeeding. You do that by reframing failure as a chance to learn and grow instead of just a dead end, which unlocks massive reserves of resilience. Perspective > Perseverance > Longevity > Opportunities for success.
A book worth reading:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk shines a light on the link between trauma, the body and the mind. Best of all, I love how it offers a roadmap for healing, even if you’re not in the mental health field.
A podcast worth listening to:
Huberman Lab is an insightful podcast that breaks down complex scientific ideas in a way that makes sense to everyone. It includes tips on applying them to our lives. Some personal favourites are the episodes on alcohol, longevity and OCD.
A saying worth repeating:
‘Boundaries are the choice between disappointing me or someone else.’ Setting boundaries is a way to honour your own values and priorities, even if it means letting someone else down. Leading a more authentic, fulfilling life is worth it.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Marcella Chamorro in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Hidden motives in everyday life
How much of our day-to-day behaviour is driven by deception and self-deception? This fascinating exploration of the human brain highlights the unconscious motives that not only decide over our own behaviour but also influence arts, politics, religion and so much more. “While we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better – and thus we don’t like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is ‘the elephant in the brain’. Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior.”
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Lessons in service & leadership
Will Guidara is a New York-based restaurateur that took on a struggling brasserie and turned it into a world-renowned, three-star restaurant, using unconventional, over-the-top acts of hospitality. His TED talk turned into a book, in which Guidara urges us “to find the magic in what we do – for ourselves, the people we work with, and the people we serve”.
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Overheard on Twitter
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Client: Tell me, what was the inspiration behind this design?
Me: The deadline.
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Food for Thought
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Oh, what a wonderful rumination about the potential of the night’s darkness and its power to instill a different quality to many moments in our life. “I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.”
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Perfectionism is often understood as a positive character trait to describe someone’s attention to detail or determination to complete a task. Psychologically, however, perfectionism is a manifestation of self-loathing that stands in the way of fully accepting who we are. Like many videos by The School of Life, this is a great, short explainer to expand our self-understanding. “One part of the mind promises the other that the completion of the next challenge will finally usher in peace. We can be very good at pretending that our ambitions are sane. But our work has a sisyphean dimension. No sooner have we rolled our working boulder up the hill, then it will tumbleback down again. There is never going to be a point of rest or a lasting feeling of completion. We are in truth ill, rather than driven.”
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If you’re not already convinced of the mental and physical benefits of ‘the walk’, let this collection of philosophical and poetic quotes on walking enlighten you. “While my own ruminations may not approach the lofty heights to which Nietzsche referred, a good long walk, or even one not so long, begins to carve out space between my thoughts that allows clarity to rise up through my shoes in a way that no other mode of transport does. The travel writer and scholar Patrick Leigh Fermor put it succinctly when he said, ‘All horsepower corrupts.’” (Possible soft paywall)
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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A gorgeous forest-setting for a compact 120 square metre ‘cabin’ home: Anawhata House near Aukland, New Zealand, is a modest off-grid house with passive cooling in summer, and a mini wood burner for winter.
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Omar Reda is a Lebanese photographer currently living and working in Saudi Arabia. His portrait photography captures initimate details of the vast cultural diversity found in remote communities. (via)
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Flax+Kale’s branding combines typographic forms with handwritten ones and even mixes text and icons to present itself in infinitely different ways.
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Berkeley Mono is a love letter to the golden era of computing. “It coalesces the objectivity of machine-readable typefaces of the 70's while simultaneously retaining the humanist sans-serif qualities. Inspired by the legendary typefaces of the past, Berkeley Mono offers exceptional straightforwardness and clarity in its form.”
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Notable Numbers
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A German study into the positive health effects of riding an electric bike concluded that, among other things, riding an electric bike regularly can drop the risk of a heart attack by 40%.
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The EU’s consumption of natural gas has dropped by 17.7% in the period August 2022 – March 2023, compared with the average gas consumption for the same months between 2017 and 2022.
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Newsletter The Hustle conducted a survey of over 700 readers about the economics of the modern dating life. It showed that the average date costs $68. The average person spent $1,260 on dates in 2022.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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