Semiconductor Chips

Chip War¹ Today, even the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget isn’t big enough to afford facilities for building cutting-edge chips for defense purposes on U.S. soil

Photolithography

Potential Future Chip Trends (as of 2023)

The future of computing will be divided between “ ‘fast lane’ applications that get powerful customized chips and ‘slow lane’ applications that get stuck using general-purpose chips whose progress fades.”¹

Intel strategy

According to Chip War, Pat Gelsinger took over in 2021 and seeks to:

1. Regain manufacturing leadership, overtaking Samsung and TSMC.
2. Launching a foundry business that will compete directly with Samsung and TSMC, producing chips for fabless firms and helping Intel win more market share. Intel’s spending heavily on new facilities in the U.S. and Europe to build capacity that potential future foundry customers will require
3. Get help from TSMC. Even while it tries to move fab production to the US, it still outsources much its chip production.

1. Miller, C. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. (Scribner, New York, 2022).