YouSaid · the spoken record

Morris Chang

lines on the record: 63
first: 2023-01-31
most recent: 2023-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, it feels like people can argue about whether, I don't know, Milwaukee or DeWalt makes the best power tools, but they don't make you a carpenter. Is that kind of the vibe here? Like, you can buy the tool, but you actually have to know how to use it.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ASML has no idea how to make chips. They're an extraordinary firm, but one company can only do so much. And this machine is just one of multiple ultra complex machines needed to make chips. So in addition to shining light at exactly the right wavelength through this really complicated optics, you also need different machines that can lay down thin films of material, just a couple of atoms thick or etch canyons in the silicon just a couple of atoms wide. And these machines are produced by different companies that have themselves unique capabilities about which ASML knows nothing and these companies know little about lithography. And the chipmakers themselves also have unique capabilities. TSMC is better than anyone, including its suppliers, at using the machines to actually effectively make chips. You really need a partnership of all of these different firms, the tool makers like ASML, the chipmakers like TSMC to actually produce effective semiconductors.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, ASML sells to customers all over the world, except in China, which we can discuss. But there's only a couple of companies that can really plausibly use UV machines. So it's TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and a couple of memory chip makers as well, SK Hynix, Micron. But there's very few other potential customers out there because the price tag is so high and the level of precision manufacturing skill needed to actually make use of them is really so niche and unique that ASML knows it will only ever have a customer base measuring a half dozen or maybe at most a dozen firms.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extraordinary complicated just shipping the machine alone takes multiple 747s to move. They cost $150 million apiece. And there are ASML staff on site next to the machine for the entire lifespan of these tools. ASML is the only company that knows how to service them when something goes wrong. They're the only company that has spare parts in case something breaks. You just can't operate them without ASML staff. And they're so sophisticated and so precise that learning how to operate them in a mass production facility requires not only the semiconductor companies like TSMC to have done a lot of research into using them, but it requires a deep partnership with ASML because they've got really unique knowledge about how the optics work, how the light reflects and refracts in different contexts. So you need to partner very, very deeply with ASML to understand how to actually use these machines in mass manufacturing.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how you get to an A13 ship. PSMC has to buy this machine from ASML, which has to assemble all these components from the flattest mirrors ever produced to the most powerful lasers ever deployed in a commercial setting to balls of tin. I imagine the balls of tin are somewhat easy to acquire. And then it has to make that machine, and then it sells it to TSMC, which then uses it to make iPhone chips or whatever else. Does ASML just like wash its hands of this machine when it sells it to TSMC? This sounds like a very complicated thing to operate.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first off, on what is lithography? If you want to make patterns on silicon wafers, you do so by shining light through masks. And so the mask will block light in certain areas, let it through another areas, and that's how you get a pattern in a miniaturized version on a chip. And advanced chips today have millions or often billions of tiny circuits carved into them. They're often the size of a virus or even smaller. So you really need ultra precise carbon capabilities. UV lithography uses light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ultra small light, far smaller than the wavelength of visible light, and you need really small wavelength light because the circuits you're carving are very, very tiny. They themselves measure just a couple of nanometers, often in dimension. So producing this type of light is really hard because it's right next to the x-ray spectrum. And so production of it is complicated. And then the development of mirrors”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“California. ASML was a company that already made older generation lithography tools and had the capabilities to turn the science into a mass manufactured device. And so that set ASML on the trajectory where it is today, the only producer in the world of machine tools that can produce UV light and use it to produce semiconductors.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of lithography, which is the process of using light to create patterns on silicon wafers, was invented in the US in the late 1950s and deployed in the chip industry from the earliest days of the first semiconductors. And the chip industry was founded in the US in Texas and Silicon Valley. And so the early users of lithography were largely American firms. And in the 1980s and 1990s, the industry was trying to move to a more advanced type of lithography called EUV lithography, extreme ultraviolet, referring to the type of light that's in the systems. A lot of the research was funded by Intel and a couple of other U.S. chip firms and done in U.S. national labs, which had the types of equipment and testing capabilities that were needed to actually make UV light at the requisite wavelength possible. But there was no U.S. firm that could commercialize this equipment. And so even though the science and technology was largely done in”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just looking into this, I had no idea that ASNL was the biggest company in the Netherlands. In many ways, it's critical to the economy of the Netherlands, which again, I think most people don't realize that shipmaking is that central to the economy of that country. And then reading your book, the process of developing EUV started here in the United States at Intel, and then it got completely away from Intel. How did it end up that a Dutch company owns this piece of critical chipmaking technology?”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, right now, the US is trying to cut off China's ability to make advanced semiconductors on the judgment that advanced semiconductors are critical to training AI systems. And so if you can't get access to the most advanced ships, you can't make meaningful advances in AI. And to make an advance semiconductor, you need to buy machine tools from just a handful of companies around the world that have the precision capabilities to manufacture these tools. And one of the most important of these companies is a firm called ASML, which is based in the Netherlands and which has unique capabilities that no one else in the world can replicate to produce a type of machine called a UV lithography tool, without which making an advanced chip is simply impossible.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here because of a news story recently that struck me as indicative of all kinds of things happening in the tech world and in the chip industry writ large, which is that President Biden is trying to pressure the Dutch government into not shipping chipmaking equipment to China. And that seems at first glance a very surprising geopolitical situation to be in. Can you explain what's going on there?”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was brought in to reset the company and in particular compete with Taiwan's TSMC, which is a manufacturing powerhouse. Intel's very existence and ability to compete with TSMC is a big deal for the United States, which just passed the Chips and Science Act and desperately wants to bring more of the chip supply chain back into the country and away from China. So how did we get to a place where Intel is the country's main strategic option and also failing? Chris walked me through a lot of this, along with some deep dives into the absolutely fascinating chip manufacturing process. This episode has everything, foreign policy, high powered lasers, hotshot executives, monopolies, the fundamental limits of physics, and of course, Texas. Okay, Chris Miller, author of the book Chip War.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economic and military support from the United States. But there are other weirder aspects to the global nature of the chip business. For example, a few weeks ago, President Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict exports from a company called ASML to China. ASML makes advanced chip lithography. It's the only company in the world that makes a specific machine you need to make the most advanced chips. ASML is also the biggest company in the Netherlands. Do you know that? It's not just that Apple couldn't make iPhone chips without this one machine from ASM. The entire Dutch economy is shaped by this one machine from ASML. The entire world economy is shaped by this one machine from ASML. How did that happen? On the flip side, here in the United States, Intel just posted one of its worst quarters ever with plunging sales and a dire forecast for next quarter. We've talked to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on decoder before.”
2023-01-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT