海外最近比较热闹的一本书，还没有翻译版，读起来还是不错的，对于芯片的复杂性和这个产业的竞争有更为全面的理解，对于产业投资还是很有意义的。照例做些摘录。
1
Yet the seismic shift that most imperils semiconductor supply today isn’t the crash of tectonic plates but the clash of great powers. As China and the United States struggle for supremacy, both Washington and Beijing are fixated on controlling the future of computing—and, to a frightening degree, that future is dependent on a small island that Beijing considers a renegade province and America has committed to defend by force. The interconnections between the chip industries in the U.S., China, and Taiwan are dizzyingly complex.
今天芯片领域的竞争和制裁或者说这场战争的背后原因并不是技术的，而是政治势力的角逐。
It was only sixty years ago that the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip wasn’t 11.8 billion, but 4. In 1961, south of San Francisco, a small firm called Fairchild Semiconductor announced a new product called the Micrologic, a silicon chip with four transistors embedded in it. Soon the company devised ways to put a dozen transistors on a chip, then a hundred. Fairchild cofounder Gordon Moore noticed in 1965 that the number of components that could be fit on each chip was doubling annually as engineers learned to fabricate ever smaller transistors. This prediction—that the computing power of chips would grow exponentially—came to be called “Moore’s Law” and led Moore to predict the invention of devices that in 1965 seemed impossibly futuristic. Looking forward from 1965, Moore predicted a decade of exponential growth—but this staggering rate of progress has continued for over half a century.
60年时间，芯片的晶体管数量从4个开始到目前的120亿个。回到1965年，后来芯片从军事到电脑、家电上的应用都是难以想象的。这么看起来，当时敢于提出摩尔定律是相当伟大的。
On their own, semiconductor materials like silicon and germanium are like glass, conducting hardly any electricity at all. But when certain materials are added and an electric field is applied, current can begin to flow. Adding phosphorous or antimony to semiconducting materials like silicon or germanium, for example, lets a negative current flow.“Doping” semiconductor materials with other elements presented an opportunity for new types of devices that could create and control electric currents.”
半导体的材料性能发现和掺杂工艺。
Noyce and Moore began to realize that miniaturization and electric efficiency were a powerful combination: smaller transistors and reduced power consumption would create new use cases for their integrated circuits. At the outset, however, Noyce’s integrated circuit cost fifty times as much to make as a simpler device with separate components wired together. Everyone agreed Noyce’s invention was clever, even brilliant. All it needed was a market.
技术的优势很明显：更小的晶体管和更低的能耗。唯一的问题是暂时还没什么市场。
Chip sales to the Apollo program transformed Fairchild from a small startup into a firm with one thousand employees. Sales ballooned from $500,000 in 1958 to $21 million two years later.
真正成就仙童半导体的既不是技术和产品，更不是VC，而是阿波罗登月计划这样的历史机遇和大客户。由此可见商业的复杂性：成就伟大企业的往往是时代，及一群被时代选中、做好准备、站在潮头的人。
Lathrop called the process photolithography—printing with light. He produced transistors much smaller than had previously been possible, measuring only a tenth of an inch in diameter, with features as small as 0.0005 inches in height. Photolithography made it possible to imagine mass-producing tiny transistors. Lathrop applied for a patent on the technique in 1957. With the Army band playing, the military gave him a medal for his work and a $25,000 cash bonus, which he used to buy his family a Nash Rambler station wagon.
光刻机的发明。
The military paid top dollar, but consumers were price sensitive. What remained tantalizing, though, was that the civilian market was far larger than even the bloated budgets of the Cold War Pentagon. “Selling R&D to the government was like taking your venture capital and putting it into a savings account,” Noyce declared. “Venturing is venturing; you want to take the risk.
To G 还是 To C 是芯片刚开始发明出来就面临的选择，今天这样的选择难题依然还在。军队能出价很高但民用能出货很大量。Noyce的选择很有意思，他认为创业公司拿了VC的钱就应该冒险，但to G这种卖给军队的业务却没冒什么风险，像是拿了VC的钱然后把钱存银行了。这个观点今天依然相当有意义！VC投资的重点之一是要收益，给LP回报，但也要有VC冒险的成分，承担起相应的社会责任来。
When U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara reformed military procurement to cut costs in the early 1960s, causing what some in the electronics industry called the “McNamara Depression,” Fairchild’s vision of chips for civilians seemed prescient. The company was the first to offer a full product line of off-the-shelf integrated circuits for civilian customers. Noyce slashed prices, too, gambling that this would drastically expand the civilian market for chips. In the mid-1960s, Fairchild chips that previously sold for $20 were cut to $2. At times Fairchild even sold products below manufacturing cost, hoping to convince more customers to try them.
Thanks to falling prices, Fairchild began winning major contracts in the private sector. Annual U.S. computer sales grew from 1,000 in 1957 to 18,700 a decade later. By the mid-1960s, almost all these computers relied on integrated circuits. In 1966, Burroughs, a computer firm, ordered 20 million chips from Fairchild—more than twenty times what the Apollo program consumed. By 1968, the computer industry was buying as many chips as the military. Fairchild chips served 80 percent of this computer market. Bob Noyce’s price cuts had paid off, opening a new market for civilian computers that would drive chip sales for decades to come. Moore later argued that Noyce’s price cuts were as big an innovation as the technology inside Fairchild’s integrated circuits.
仙童也曾负毛利出货。仙童赌的方向是对的，大规模量产、快速降价，然后赶上了美国60年代军方降成本减支出的新机会成就了自己。摩尔都称赞Noyce的降成本贡献不亚于发明集成电路！
2
A CIA report in 1959 found that America was only two to four years ahead of the Soviets in quality and quantity of transistors produced. At least several of the early Soviet exchange students were KGB agents—suspected at the time, but not confirmed until decades later—forging an intimate connection between student exchanges and Soviet defense industrial goals.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was committed to outcompeting the United States in every sphere, from corn production to satellite launches. Khrushchev himself was more comfortable on collective farms than in electronics labs. He understood nothing about technology but was obsessed with the notion of “catching up and overtaking” the United States, as he repeatedly promised to do.
The USSR excelled in quantity but not in quality or purity, both of which were crucial to high-volume chipmaking. Moreover, the Western allies prohibited the transfer of many advanced technologies, including semiconductor components, to Communist countries via an organization called COCOM.
芯片刚出现的60年代，苏联落户美国仅仅2-4年。但当时的赫鲁晓夫比起芯片更喜欢集体农场，就这样给耽误了。苏联的套路还是重数量轻质量，方向也走错了。
Soviet leaders never comprehended how the “copy it” strategy condemned them to backwardness. The entire Soviet semiconductor sector functioned like a defense contractor—secretive, top-down, oriented toward military systems, fulfilling orders with little scope for creativity. The copying process was “tightly controlled” by Minister Shokin, one of his subordinates remembered. Copying was literally hardwired into the Soviet semiconductor industry, with some chipmaking machinery using inches rather than centimeters to better replicate American designs, even though the rest of the USSR used the metric system. Thanks to the “copy it” strategy, the USSR started several years behind the U.S. in transistor technology and never caught up.
苏联的抄袭策略在半导体上无法奏效。正是这个策略导致了苏联开始全面落后。
Sony had the benefit of cheaper wages in Japan, but its business model was ultimately about innovation, product design, and marketing. Morita’s “license it” strategy couldn’t have been more different from the “copy it” tactics of Soviet Minister Shokin.
Throughout the 1960s, Japanese firms paid sizeable licensing fees on intellectual property, handing over 4.5 percent of all chip sales to Fairchild, 3.5 percent to Texas Instruments, and 2 percent to Western Electric. U.S. chipmakers were happy to transfer their technology because Japanese firms appeared to be years behind.
索尼和日本公司通过大量的授权买技术来生产芯片，用上日本低工资优势和产品创新，开始占据市场。
Fairchild continued to make its silicon wafers in California but began shipping semiconductors to Hong Kong for final assembly. In 1963, its first year of operation, the Hong Kong facility assembled 120 million devices. Production quality was excellent, because low labor costs meant Fairchild could hire trained engineers to run assembly lines, which would have been prohibitively expensive in California.
Within a decade, almost all U.S. chipmakers had foreign assembly facilities. Sporck began looking beyond Hong Kong. The city’s 25-cent hourly wages were only a tenth of American wages but were among the highest in Asia. In the mid-1960s, Taiwanese workers made 19 cents an hour, Malaysians 15 cents, Singaporeans 11 cents, and South Koreans only a dime.
1963年，仙童就在香港设立了第一个封装工厂。这也是亚洲四小龙起步的原点。相比当时香港25美分的工资，韩国仅仅是10美分。
Colonel Davis gave Texas Instruments nine months and $99,000 to deliver this laser-guided bomb, which, thanks to its simple design, quickly passed the Air Force’s tests. On May 13, 1972, U.S. aircraft dropped twenty-four of the bombs on the Thanh Hoa Bridge, which until that day had been still standing amid hundreds of craters, like a monument to the inaccuracy of mid-century bombing tactics. This time, American bombs scored direct hits. Dozens of other bridges, rail junctions, and other strategic points were hit with new precision bombs. A simple laser sensor and a couple of transistors had turned a weapon with a zero-for-638 hit ratio into a tool of precision destruction.
TI的芯片搞出来的高精度炸弹改变了越战格局，虽然结果没变，但改变了美国的军事装备思路。看今天的俄乌战争中，俄罗斯的痛苦如同五十年前越战的美军一般：没有精确制导武器，战争昂贵而无进展。
Taiwanese officials like K. T. Li, who’d studied nuclear physics at Cambridge and ran a steel mill before steering Taiwan’s economic development through the postwar decades, began crystallizing a strategy to integrate economically with the United States. Semiconductors were at the center of this plan. Li knew there were plenty of Taiwanese-American semiconductor engineers willing to help. In Dallas, Morris Chang urged his colleagues at TI to set up a facility in Taiwan.
台湾的半导体发展起来就是源于当时的官方把张忠谋招商回来了。有时候一个人也可以改变历史。
Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society. The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. “Society’s fate will hang in the balance,” Carver Mead declared. “The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space.” Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel’s leaders knew that if they succeeded in drastically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow. “We are really the revolutionaries in the world today,” Gordon Moore declared in 1973, “not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.
微电子芯片成了决定社会发展方向的催化剂。不得不佩服英特尔的远见。
Viewed from the Pentagon upon his arrival in 1977, the world looked far darker. The U.S. had just lost the Vietnam War. Worse, the Soviet Union had almost completely eroded America’s military advantage, warned Pentagon analysts like Andrew Marshall. Marshall’s grim conclusion was that after a decade of pointless fighting in Southeast Asia, the U.S. had lost its military advantage. He was fixated on regaining it. Though Washington had been shocked by Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Soviets had built a big enough stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles to guarantee that enough of their atomic weapons could survive a U.S. nuclear strike to retaliate with a devastating atomic barrage of their own. More worrisome, the Soviet army had far more tanks and planes, which were already deployed on potential battlegrounds in Europe. The U.S.—facing pressure at home to cut military spending—simply couldn’t keep up.
Strategists like Marshall knew the only answer to the Soviet quantitative advantage was to produce better quality weapons. Guided missiles would not only “offset” the USSR’s quantitative advantage, he reasoned. They’d force the Soviets to undertake a ruinously expensive anti-missile effort in response. Perry calculated Moscow would need five to ten years and $30 to $50 billion to defend against the three thousand American cruise missiles that the Pentagon planned to field—and even then, the Soviets could only destroy half the incoming missiles if they were all fired at the USSR.
70年代末的美国日子并不好过，刚输了越战，军事上看起来也输给了苏联，苏联在所有武器的数量上都很有优势。面对苏联的数量优势，美国的战略家选择了更高的质量优势。
3
The 1980s were a hellish decade for the entire U.S. semiconductor sector. Silicon Valley thought it sat atop the world’s tech industry, but after two decades of rapid growth it now faced an existential crisis: cutthroat competition from Japan.
In addition to American companies like Intel and TI, Japanese firms like Toshiba and NEC were now building DRAM memory chips—though most people in Silicon Valley didn’t take these players seriously. U.S. chipmakers were run by the people who’d invented high-tech. They joked that Japan was the country of “click, click”—the sound made by cameras that Japanese engineers brought to chip conferences to better copy the ideas. The fact that major American chipmakers were embroiled in intellectual property lawsuits with Japanese rivals was interpreted as evidence that Silicon Valley was still well ahead.
Chips weren’t the only U.S. industry facing pressure from high-quality, ultra-efficient Japanese competitors. In the immediate postwar years, “Made in Japan” had been a synonym for “cheap.” But entrepreneurs like Sony’s Akio Morita had cast off this reputation for low price, replacing it with products that were as high quality as those of any American competitor. Morita’s transistor radios were the first prominent challenger to American economic preeminence, and their success emboldened Morita and his Japanese peers to set their sights even higher. American industries from cars to steel were facing intense Japanese competition.”
美国大规模发展半导体之后的20年却快走到了死胡同，日本人快把美国的芯片产业灭了，生死存亡。美国人开始打专利官司
The best evidence against the thesis that Japan was an “implementer” rather than an “innovator” was Kikuchi’s boss, Sony CEO Akio Morita. Morita knew that replication was a recipe for second-class status and second-rate profits. He drove his engineers not only to build the best radios and TVs, but to imagine new types of products entirely.In 1979, just months before Anderson’s presentation about quality problems in American chips, Sony introduced the Walkman. Sony sold 385 million units worldwide, making the Walkman one of the most popular consumer devices in history. This was innovation at its purest, and it had been made in Japan.
索尼的思路还是非常清楚的，copy只能在产业链上居于人下，二等公民和二等利润，创新才有机会。因此才有了上个时代的Ipod，Walkman的横空出世，卖出了3.85亿台。
“We’re at war with Japan,” Sporck insisted. “Not with guns and ammunition, but an economic war with technology, productivity, and quality.”
Sporck saw Silicon Valley’s internal battles as fair fights, but thought Japan’s DRAM firms benefitted from intellectual property theft, protected markets, government subsidies, and cheap capital. Sporck had a point about the spies. After a 5 a.m. rendezvous in the lobby of a Hartford, Connecticut, hotel on a cold November morning in 1981, Hitachi employee Jun Naruse handed over an envelope of cash and received in exchange a badge from a “consultant” at a company called Glenmar that promised to help Hitachi obtain industrial secrets. With the badge, Naruse gained entrance to a secret facility run by aircraft maker Pratt & Whitney and photographed the company’s newest computer.
After the photo shoot, Naruse’s colleague on the West Coast, Kenji Hayashi, sent a letter to Glenmar proposing a “consultation service contract.” Hitachi’s senior executives authorized half a million dollars in payments to Glenmar to continue the relationship. But Glenmar was a front company; its employees were FBI agents. “It seems that Hitachi stepped into the trap,” the company’s spokesman sheepishly admitted,after Hitachi’s employees were arrested and the story made the front page of the business section of the New York Times.
中美脱钩下的华为孟晚舟的故事和当年日美之间的这个日立间谍的故事居然如此神似。历史真是一遍一遍的重演。
Jerry Sanders saw Silicon Valley’s biggest disadvantage as its high cost of capital. The Japanese “pay 6 percent, maybe 7 percent, for capital. I pay 18 percent on a good day,” he complained. Building advanced manufacturing facilities was brutally expensive, so the cost of credit was hugely important. A next-generation chip emerged roughly once every two years, requiring new facilities and new machinery. In the 1980s, U.S. interest rates reached 21.5 percent as the Federal Reserve sought to fight inflation.
日本芯片产业的巨大优势就是便宜的信贷资金，也是源于政府的支持和扶植。美国的利率水平大约20%，相比之下的日本只有6-7%，这个优势确实相当巨大。
Several years later, in 1978, GCA introduced its first stepper. Sales orders began rolling in. Before the stepper, GCA had never made more than $50 million a year in revenue on its military contracts, but now it had a monopoly on an extraordinarily valuable machine. Revenue soon hit $300 million and the company’s stock price surged.
Just as the market slumped, GCA lost its position as the only company building steppers. Japan’s Nikon had initially been a partner of GCA, providing the precision lenses for its stepper. But Greenberg had decided to cut Nikon out, buying his own lens maker, New York−based Tropel, which made lenses for the U2 spy planes but which struggled to produce the number of high-quality lenses GCA needed. Meanwhile, GCA’s customer service atrophied. The company’s attitude, one analyst recounted, was “buy what we build and don’t bother us.” The company’s own employees admitted that “customers got fed up.” This was the attitude of a monopolist—but GCA was no longer a monopoly. After Greenberg stopped buying Nikon lenses, the Japanese company decided to make its own stepper. It acquired a machine from GCA and reverse engineered it. Soon Nikon had more market share than GCA.
GCA发明了步进式的光刻机，销售额剧增。但随着日本芯片产业的崛起，GCA也日益艰难。GCA的衰落主要是市场竞争原因，也有其自身对客户的傲慢因素。
Semiconductors are the “crude oil of the 1980s,” Jerry Sanders declared, “and the people who control the crude oil will control the electronics industry.” As CEO of AMD, one of America’s biggest chipmakers, Sanders had plenty of self-interested reasons to describe his main product as strategically crucial. But was he wrong? Throughout the 1980s, America’s computer industry expanded rapidly, as PCs were made small enough and cheap enough for an individual home or office. Every business was coming to rely on them. Computers couldn’t work without integrated circuits. Nor, by the 1980s, could planes, automobiles, camcorders, microwaves, or the Sony Walkman. Every American now had semiconductors in their houses and cars; many used dozens of chips daily.
半导体已经是石油般的重要。
The U.S. military was more dependent on electronics—and thus on chips—than ever before. By the 1980s, the report found, around 17 percent of military spending went toward electronics, compared to 6 percent at the end of World War II. Everything from satellites to early warning radars to self-guided missiles depended on advanced chips. The Pentagon’s task force summarized the ramifications in four bullet points, underlining the key conclusions:
（1）U.S. military forces depend heavily on technological superiority to win.
（2）Electronics is the technology that can be leveraged most highly.
（3）Semiconductors are the key to leadership in electronics.
（4）U.S. defense will soon depend on foreign sources for state-of-the-art technology in semiconductors.
美国的战略清醒。
Noyce’s focus, however, was saving America’s lithography industry. Fifty-one percent of Sematech funding went to American lithography firms. Noyce explained the logic simply: lithography got half the money because it was “half the problem” facing the chip industry. It was impossible to make semiconductors without lithography tools, but the only remaining major U.S. producers were struggling to survive. America might soon be reliant on foreign equipment. Testifying to Congress in 1989, Noyce declared that “Sematech may likely be judged, in large part, as to how successful it is in saving America’s optical stepper makers.”
Noyce agreed, and when he arrived in Massachusetts he decided that day to buy $13 million worth of GCA’s newest equipment, as part of a program to share American-built semiconductor equipment with U.S. chipmakers and encourage them to buy more domestically produced tools.Sematech bet hugely on GCA, giving the company contracts to produce deep-ultraviolet lithography equipment that was at the cutting edge of the industry’s capabilities. GCA delivered far beyond expectations, living up to its earlier reputation for technological brilliance. Soon independent industry analysts were describing GCA’s newest steppers as “the best in the world.
But GCA still didn’t have a viable business model. Being “ahead of your time” is good for scientists but not necessarily for manufacturing firms seeking sales. Customers had already gotten comfortable with equipment from competitors like Nikon, Canon, and ASML, and didn’t want to take a risk on new and unfamiliar tools from a company whose future was uncertain. If GCA went bankrupt, customers might struggle to get spare parts. Unless a big customer could be convinced to sign a major contract with GCA, the company would spiral toward collapse. It lost $30 million between 1988 and 1992, despite $70 million in support from Sematech. Even Noyce could never convince Intel, the company he’d founded, to switch its allegiance from Nikon.
美国当年举国体制的例子：Sematech，挽救美国的光刻机和芯片行业于水火，确实起到了极为关键的作用。从这个角度看，就不难理解国内当下的所谓举国体制攻关了。
As commercial tension between the U.S. and Japan increased, Morita served as informal ambassador, explaining Japan to American powerbrokers. Morita at first found the power and wealth represented by his American friends seductive. As America lurched from crisis to crisis, however, the aura around men like Henry Kissinger and Pete Peterson began to wane. Their country’s system wasn’t working—but Japan’s was. By the 1980s, Morita perceived deep problems in America’s economy and society. America had long seen itself as Japan’s teacher, but Morita thought America had lessons to learn as it struggled with a growing trade deficit and the crisis in its high-tech industries. “The United States has been busy creating lawyers,” Morita lectured, while Japan has “been busier creating engineers.” Moreover, American executives were too focused on “this year’s profit,” in contrast to Japanese management, which was “long range.” American labor relations were hierarchical and “old style,” without enough training or motivation for shop-floor employees. Americans should stop complaining about Japan’s success, Morita believed. It was time to tell his American friends: Japan’s system simply worked better.
In 1989, Morita set out his views in a collection of essays titled The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals.”
索尼盛田昭夫当年是日美芯片战争的中间人，民间的介绍日本模式给美国的大使。核心议题居然也是08年金融危机时中国在讨论过的：美国模式不行了，日本模式ok，只不过08年是所谓的华盛顿共识和北京共识的差异，历史再一次惊人的相似。盛田批评美国人不注重工程师，注重律师；不注重长期利益，注重短期利润今天依然存在。还有那本著名的书，日本人可以说不…
This was an embarrassing admission for Brown, the Pentagon leader who’d hired Bill Perry in 1977 and empowered him to put semiconductors and computing power at the core of the military’s most important new weapons systems. Brown and Perry succeeded in convincing the military to embrace microprocessors, but they hadn’t anticipated Silicon Valley losing its lead. Their strategy paid off in terms of new weapons systems, but many of these now depended on Japan.”
日本人的骄傲引来了美国军方的恐慌：这么重要的武器部件，却要依赖日本。带来了后面的一系列麻烦，很多情况下，经济和政治是分不开、相互转化的，看似是贸易和商业竞争，实际也是政治势力的角逐。
4
Yet Jack Simplot understood business in a way Silicon Valley’s smartest scientists didn’t. As America’s chip industry struggled to adjust to Japan’s challenge, cowboy entrepreneurs like him played a fundamental role in reversing what Bob Noyce had called a “death spiral” and executing a surprise turnaround. Silicon Valley’s resurgence was driven by scrappy startups and by wrenching corporate transformations. The U.S. overtook Japan’s DRAM behemoths not by replicating them but by innovating around them. Rather than cutting itself off from trade, Silicon Valley offshored even more production to Taiwan and South Korea to regain its competitive advantage.
美光的jack能在整体行业面临惨败的时候独辟蹊径，这就是市场自由竞争的力量，源源不断的创新。日本赶上美国是靠copy的后发优势，美国是靠创新来持续领先，思路不同，结果不同。
As all of Silicon Valley’s tech titans were fleeing DRAM chips amid the Japanese onslaught, Simplot instinctively understood that Ward and Joe Parkinson were entering the memory market at exactly the right time. A potato farmer like him saw clearly that Japanese competition had turned DRAM chips into a commodity market. He’d been through enough harvests to know that the best time to buy a commodity business was when prices were depressed and everyone else was in liquidation. Simplot decided to back Micron with $1 million. He’d later pour in millions more.
行业低点也是历史机遇。土豆商人更理解大宗商品，DRAM芯片成为大宗商品后，最好的买入机会就是行业陷入低谷的时候。毕竟这是永不停息的周期，高点还会回来就好。
“While most of his competitors were fixated on shrinking the size of transistors and capacitors on each chip, Ward realized that if he shrunk the size of the chip itself, Micron could put more chips on each of the circular silicon wafers that it processed. This made manufacturing far more efficient. “It was by far the worst product on the market,” Ward joked, “but by far the least expensive to produce.”
提高密度。
Grove described his management philosophy in his bestselling book Only the Paranoid Survive: “Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.”
In 1980, Intel had won a small contract with IBM, America’s computer giant, to build chips for a new product called a personal computer. IBM contracted with a young programmer named Bill Gates to write software for the computer’s operating system.
只有偏执狂才能生存的intel老大。DRAM领域惨败后，一个小合同成就了更为伟大的公司。
Intel’s new manufacturing method was called “copy exactly.” Once Intel determined that a specific set of production processes worked best, they were replicated in all other Intel facilities. Before then, engineers had prided themselves on fine-tuning Intel’s processes. Now they were asked not to think, but to replicate. “It was a huge cultural issue,” one remembered, as a freewheeling Silicon Valley style was replaced with assembly line rigor. “I was perceived as a dictator,” Barrett admitted. But “copy exactly” worked: Intel’s yields rose substantially, while its manufacturing equipment was used more efficiently, driving down costs. Each of the company’s plants began to function less like a research lab and more like a finely tuned machine.
Grove and Intel got lucky, too. Some of the structural factors that had favored Japanese producers in the early 1980s began to shift. Between 1985 and 1988, the value of the Japanese yen doubled against the dollar, making American exports cheaper. Interest rates in the U.S. fell sharply over the 1980s, reducing Intel’s capital costs. Meanwhile, Texas-based Compaq Computer muscled in on IBM’s PC market, driven by the realization that though it was hard to write operating systems or build microprocessors.
规模化生产、持续提高良率，给Intel成就一代王者铺平了道路。
U.S.-Japan trade tension helped Korean companies, too. After Washington threatened tariffs unless Japan stopped “dumping”—selling DRAM chips cheaply on the U.S. market—in 1986, Tokyo agreed to limit its sales of chips to the U.S. and promised not to sell at low prices. This provided an opening for Korean companies to sell more DRAM chips at higher prices. The Americans didn’t intend for the deal to benefit Korean firms, but they were happy to see anyone but Japan producing the chips they needed.
The U.S. didn’t simply provide a market for South Korean DRAM chips; it provided technology, too. With Silicon Valley’s DRAM producers mostly near collapse, there was little hesitation about transferring top-notch technology to Korea. Lee proposed to license a design for a 64K DRAM from Micron, the cash-strapped memory chip startup, befriending its founder Ward Parkinson in the process. The Idahoans, looking for any money they could get, eagerly agreed even if it meant Samsung would learn many of their processes. “Whatever we did, Samsung did,” Parkinson remembered, seeing the cash infusion that Samsung provided as “not crucial, but close” in helping Micron survive.
韩国是当年日美半导体争端最大的受益方。这轮中美脱钩的最大受益方呢？日美争端中日方进行了配额制，半导体出口价格提高直接让弱小的韩国半导体公司收益，大量出口接管了日本失去的市场份额。
The companies like Intel and Micron that survived did so less thanks to their engineering skills—though these were important—than their ability to capitalize on technical aptitude to make money in a hypercompetitive, unforgiving industry.
关键是在高度竞争的行业中如何最大化自己的能力来赚钱，这是核心。是商业能力，不只是技术能力。
Planes using laser guidance for their bomb strikes hit thirteen times as many targets as comparable planes without guided munitions. U.S. airpower proved decisive in the Persian Gulf War, decimating Iraqi forces while minimizing U.S. casualties. Weldon Word received an award for inventing the Paveway, improving its electronics, and driving down its cost so that each one was never more expensive than a jalopy, just as he had originally promised. It took several decades for people outside the U.S. military to realize how the Paveway and other weapons like it were changing war. But pilots who used these bombs knew just how transformative they were. “There are about ten thousand Americans who didn’t get killed because of you guys,” an Air Force officer told Word at the Pentagon award ceremony. Advanced microelectronics and a set of wings strapped to a bomb had transformed the nature of military power.
半导体加持的精确制导炸弹改变了美俄的军事实力对比，美国完胜。
As Japan’s stock market crashed, the country’s vaunted long-term thinking no longer looked so visionary. Japan’s seeming dominance had been built on an unsustainable foundation of government-backed overinvestment. Cheap capital had underwritten the construction of new semiconductor fabs, but also encouraged chipmakers to think less about profit and more about output. Japan’s biggest semiconductor firms doubled down on DRAM production even as lower cost producers like Micron and South Korea’s Samsung undercut Japanese rivals.
The biggest error that Japan’s chip firms made, however, was to miss the rise of PCs. None of the Japanese chip giants could replicate Intel’s pivot to microprocessors or its mastery of the PC ecosystem. Only one Japanese firm, NEC, really tried, but it never won more than a tiny share of the microprocessor market. For Andy Grove and Intel, making money on microprocessors was a matter of life or death. Japan’s DRAM firms, with massive market share and few financial constraints, ignored the microprocessor market until it was too late. As a result, the PC revolution mostly benefitted American chip firms. By the time Japan’s stock market crashed, Japan’s semiconductor dominance was already eroding. In 1993, the U.S. retook first place in semiconductor shipments. In 1998, South Korean firms had overtaken Japan as the world’s largest producers of DRAM, while Japan’s market share fell from 90 percent in the late 1980s to 20 percent by 1998.
90年代的日本金融危机让日本人看清楚了之前过度乐观的情况，一切都是建立在不扎实的基础上，于是一切都会跌回去：长期变得不可能，便宜的资本不可持续，产业也开始溃败，更为严重的是：没机会抓住正在兴起的PC的历史性机会了。
5
Minister Li followed through on his promise to find the money for the business plan Chang drew up. The Taiwanese government provided 48 percent of the startup capital for TSMC, stipulating only that Chang find a foreign chip firm to provide advanced production technology. He was turned down by his former colleagues at TI and by Intel. “Morris, you’ve had a lot of good ideas in your time,” Gordon Moore told him. “This isn’t one of them.” However, Chang convinced Philips, the Dutch semiconductor company, to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.5 percent stake in TSMC. The rest of the capital was raised from wealthy Taiwanese who were “asked” by the government to invest. “What generally happened was that one of the ministers in the government would call a businessman in Taiwan,” Chang explained, “to get him to invest.” The government asked several of the island’s wealthiest families. From day one, TSMC wasn’t really a private business: it was a project of the Taiwanese state.
台积电从成立第一天起，就是台湾“举岛体制”的产物。
The Singaporean government also tried replicating TSMC, establishing a foundry called Chartered Semiconductor, though the company never performed as well as its Taiwanese rival.
举国体制新加坡也试了，不那么成功。
More than at any point since Jay Lathrop had turned his microscope upside down in his U.S. military lab, in the 1990s the future of lithography was in doubt. Three existential questions hung over the lithography industry: engineering, business, and geopolitics.
Some researchers sought to use beams of electrons to carve chips, but electron beam lithography was never fast enough for mass production. Others placed their bet on X-rays or extreme ultraviolet light, each of which reacted with different sets of photoresist chemicals. At the annual international conference of lithography experts, scientists debated which technique would win out. It was a time of “lithography wars,” one participant put it, between competing groups of engineers.
光刻机不容易，电子路线走不通，继续回到
“Grove wasn’t convinced. “Abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry,” he declared, pointing to the electric battery industry. The U.S. “lost its lead in batteries thirty years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices,” Grove wrote. Then it missed PC batteries, and now was far behind on batteries for electric vehicles. “I doubt they will ever catch up,” he predicted in 2010.”
6
By the 2000s, it was common to split the semiconductor industry into three categories. “Logic” refers to the processors that run smartphones, computers, and servers. “Memory” refers to DRAM, which provides the short-term memory computers need to operate, and flash, also called NAND, which remembers data over time. The third category of chips is more diffuse, including analog chips like sensors that convert visual or audio signals into digital data, radio frequency chips that communicate with cell phone networks, and semiconductors that manage how devices use electricity. This third category has not been primarily dependent on Moore’s Law to drive performance improvements. Clever design matters more than shrinking transistors. Today around three-quarters of this category of chips are produced on processors at or larger than 180 nanometers, a manufacturing technology that was pioneered in the late 1990s.
存储、逻辑和模拟芯片的三大分类中，模拟芯片不太依赖制程，更依赖设计，还在180纳米工艺节点上。
To better control the movement of electrons, new materials and transistor designs were needed. Unlike the 2D design used since the 1960s, the 22nm node introduced a new 3D transistor, called a FinFET (pronounced finfet), that sets the two ends of the circuit and the channel of semiconductor material that connects them on top of a block, looking like a fin protruding from a whale’s back. The channel that connects the two ends of the circuit can therefore have an electric field applied not only from the top but also from the sides of the fin, enhancing control over the electrons and overcoming the electricity leakage that was threatening the performance of new generations of tiny transistors. These nanometer-scale 3D structures were crucial for the survival of Moore’s Law, but they were staggeringly difficult to make, requiring even more precision in deposition, etching, and lithography. This added uncertainty about whether the major chipmakers would all flawlessly execute the switch to FinFET architectures or whether one might fall behind.”
FinFET的3D工艺才成就了22纳米节点。
Mobile devices would be a “game-changer” for the chip industry, he told Forbes, perceiving them as heralding shifts as significant as the PC had brought. He was committed to winning the lion’s share of this business, whatever the cost. Chang realized that TSMC could pull ahead of rivals technologically because it was a neutral player around which other companies would design their products. He called this TSMC’s “Grand Alliance,” a partnership of dozens of companies that design chips, sell intellectual property, produce materials, or manufacture machinery.
“As smartphones began to take off, driving up demand for silicon, Morris Chang sat at the center. “TSMC knows it is important to use everyone’s innovation,” Chang declared, “ours, that of the equipment makers, of our customers, and of the IP providers. That’s the power of the Grand Alliance.” The financial implications of this were profound. “The combined R&D spending of TSMC and its ten biggest customers,” he bragged “exceeds that of Samsung and Intel together.” The old model of integrating design and manufacture would struggle to compete when the rest of the industry was coalescing around TSMC.”
TSMC的成果不是偶然的，张忠谋对移动端的判断遥遥领先于业内。
“EUV was one of the biggest technological gambles of our time. In 2012, years before ASML had produced a functional EUV tool, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC had each invested directly in ASML to ensure the company had the funding needed to continue developing EUV tools that their future chipmaking capabilities would require. Intel alone invested $4 billion in ASML in 2012, one of the highest-stakes bets the company ever made, an investment that followed billions of dollars of previous grants and investments Intel had spent on EUV, dating back to the era of Andy Grove.”
“ASML rewarded certain suppliers with investment, like the $1 billion it paid Zeiss in 2016 to fund that company’s R&D process. It held all of them, however, to exacting standards. “If you don’t behave, we’re going to buy you,” ASML’s CEO Peter Wennink told one supplier. It wasn’t a joke: ASML ended up buying several suppliers, including Cymer, after concluding it could better manage them itself.”
EUV是一场世纪豪赌。客户大量投资给ASML，ASML反过来大量投资给供应链的世纪研发合作结晶。这么大的一件事情，其影响意义估计才刚刚显现，我们还没有意识到。
“TSMC, Intel, and Samsung were certain to adopt EUV, though they had different strategies about when and how to embrace it. GlobalFoundries was less confident. The company had struggled with its 28nm process. To reduce the risk of delays, it decided to license its 14nm process from Samsung rather than develop it in-house, a decision that didn’t suggest confidence in its R&D efforts.”
GF已经掉队了。14nm买来，可能都不如自研的SMIC了。
7
“When it comes to core intellectual property, the building blocks of transistor patterns from which many chips are designed, China’s market share is 2 percent; most of the rest is American or British. China supplies 4 percent of the world’s silicon wafers and other chipmaking materials; 1 percent of the tools used to fabricate chips; 5 percent of the market for chip designs. It has only a 7 percent market share in the business of fabricating chips. None of this fabrication capacity involves high-value, leading-edge technology.”
芯片的技术积累和产业链上，无疑我们是相当落后的。这就是相当长的路要走，相当多的困难要克服。
“Rather than trying to sell chips and servers to Chinese customers, she announced, IBM would open its chip technology to Chinese partners, enabling them, she explained, to “create a new and vibrant ecosystem of Chinese companies producing homegrown computer systems for the local and international markets.” IBM’s decision to trade technology for market access made business sense. The firm’s technology was seen as second-rate, and without Beijing’s imprimatur it was unlikely to reverse its post-Snowden market shrinkage. IBM was simultaneously trying to shift its global business from selling hardware to selling services, so sharing access to its chip designs seemed logical.
For China’s government, however, this partnership wasn’t solely about business. One of the individuals working with IBM’s newly available chip technology was the former cyber security chief of China’s nuclear missile arsenal, Shen Changxiang, the New York Times reported. Just a year earlier, Shen had been warning of the “huge security risks” in working with U.S. firms. Now he appeared to have concluded that IBM’s offer to turn over chip technology supported Beijing’s semiconductor strategy and China’s national interests.”
IBM和国内的甜蜜岁月。
“However, Zhao’s real interest was in buying the island’s crown jewels—MediaTek, the leading chip designer outside the U.S., and TSMC, the foundry on which almost all the world’s fabless chip firms rely. He floated the idea of buying a 25 percent stake in TSMC and advocated merging MediaTek with Tsinghua Unigroup’s chip design businesses. Neither transaction was legal under Taiwan’s existing foreign investment rules, but when Zhao returned from Taiwan he took the stage at a public conference in Beijing and suggested China should ban imports of Taiwanese chips if Taipei didn’t change these restrictions.”
赵伟国的台湾之行居然是要拿下TSMC，何其嚣张。事后来看，这么痴人说梦还是不懂半导体。
In spring 2016, Tsinghua quietly bought 6 percent of the shares in Lattice Semiconductor, another U.S. chip firm. “This is purely a financial investment,” Zhao told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have any intention at all to try to acquire Lattice.” Scarcely weeks after the investment was publicized, Tsinghua Unigroup began to sell its shares in Lattice. Shortly thereafter, Lattice received a buyout offer from a California-based investment firm called Canyon Bridge, which journalists from Reuters revealed had been discreetly funded by the Chinese government. The U.S. government firmly rejected the deal. While Canyon Bridge was maneuvering to purchase Lattice Semiconductor, for example, one of Canyon Bridge’s cofounders tipped off a colleague in Beijing, passing along details about the transaction via WeChat and at meetings in a Starbucks in Beijing. His colleague bought stock based on this knowledge; the Canyon Bridge executive was convicted of insider trading.”
大举海外收购中的一个小插曲，不堪，不遵守规则，把别人当傻子。这么大的事居然星巴克谈。
“However, the company asked its consultants to determine its supply chain risk. They reported that the company had two key vulnerabilities: access to Google’s Android operating system, the core software on which all non-Apple smartphones run, and the supply of the semiconductors that every smartphone requires. The company identified the 250 most important semiconductors that its products required and began designing as many as possible in-house. These chips were largely related to the business of building telecom base stations but also included the application processors for the company’s smartphones, semiconductors that were monstrously complex and required the most advanced chipmaking technology. ”
华为还是提前有防备的，只是250个重要芯片的依赖太多了吧。
“The battle for the electromagnetic spectrum will be an invisible struggle conducted by semiconductors. Radar, jamming, and communications are all managed by complex radio frequency chips and digital-analog converters, which modulate signals to take advantage of open spectrum space, send signals in a specific direction, and try to confuse adversaries’ sensors. Simultaneously, powerful digital chips will run complex algorithms inside a radar or jammer that assess the 289signals received and decide what signals to send out in a matter of milliseconds. At stake is a military’s ability to see and to communicate.”
未来的战争重点将会是频谱战、电磁战了。
“One U.S. semiconductor executive wryly summed things up to a White House official: “Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.”
这也是中美目前更多是博弈，不是对抗的核心原因。未来未必真脱钩。
“The real issue was that a company in the People’s Republic of China had marched up the technology ladder—from, in the late 1980s, simple phone switches to, by the late 2010s, the most advanced telecom and networking gear. Its annual R&D spending now rivaled American tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Intel. Of all China’s tech firms, it was the most successful exporter, giving it detailed knowledge of foreign markets. It not only produced hardware for cell towers, it also designed cutting-edge smartphone chips. It had become TSMC’s second biggest customer, behind only Apple. The pressing question was: Could the United States let a Chinese company like this succeed?”
历史上美国反复给出的答案是No.
“Nevertheless, it’s surprising that China’s done nothing to retaliate against the hobbling of its most global tech firm. It has repeatedly threatened to punish U.S. tech firms but never pulled the trigger. Beijing said it was drawing up an “unreliable entity list” of foreign companies that endanger Chinese security, but it doesn’t appear to have added any firms to the list. Beijing has evidently calculated that it’s better to accept that Huawei will become a second-rate technology player than to hit back against the United States. The U.S., it turns out, has escalation dominance when it comes to severing supply chains. “Weaponized interdependence,” one former senior official mused after the strike on Huawei. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
这就是现状，打不过得认。
“Perhaps in a decade China can succeed in building its own EUV scanner. If so, the program will cost tens of billions of dollars, but—in a revelation that is bound to be discouraging—when it’s ready it will no longer be cutting edge. By that time, ASML will have introduced a new generation tool, called high-aperture EUV, which is scheduled to be ready in the mid-2020s and cost $300 million per machine, twice the cost of the first generation EUV machine.”
技术进步丝毫不停，新的EUV即将出来。
“China’s also investing heavily in emerging semiconductor materials like silicon carbide and gallium nitride, which are unlikely to displace pure silicon in most chips but will likely play a bigger role in managing the power systems in electric vehicles. Here,”
碳化硅和氮化镓有超车机会，但目前还是在功率半导体上，电源类芯片。存储和数字上没太多变化。
“Barring severe new restrictions on access to foreign software and machinery, China looks likely to play a much bigger role in producing non-cutting-edge logic chips. In addition, it’s pouring money into the materials needed to develop power management chips for electric vehicles. China’s YMTC, meanwhile, has a real chance to win a chunk of the NAND memory market. Across the chip industry, estimates suggest that China’s share of fabrication will increase from 15 percent at the start of the decade to 24 percent of global capacity by 2030, overtaking Taiwan and South Korea in terms of volume. China will almost certainly still lag technologically. But if more of the chip industry moves to China, the country will have more leverage in demanding technology transfer.”
非先进制程的逻辑芯片、存储芯片都大有可为。未必要从欧美抢市场，日韩其实是第一步。
“Although the Biden administration has promised to work “with industry, allies, and partners,” the U.S. and its allies aren’t completely aligned when it comes to the future of the chip industry. The U.S. wants to reverse its declining share of chip fabrication and retain its dominant position in semiconductor design and machinery. Countries in Europe and Asia, however, would like to grab a bigger share of the high-value chip design market. Taiwan and South Korea, meanwhile, have no plans to surrender their market-leading positions fabricating advanced logic and memory chips. With China viewing expansion of its own fabrication capacity as a national security necessity, there’s a limited amount of future chip fabrication business that can be shared between the U.S., Europe, and Asia.”
美国也不容易，重建自己的芯片产业，伤害的不只是中国，也会有其各个战略盟友的利益了。
“Silicon Valley isn’t simply a story of science or engineering. Technology only advances when it finds a market. The history of the semiconductor is also a story of sales, marketing, supply chain management, and cost reduction. Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist without the entrepreneurs who built it. Bob Noyce was an MIT-trained physicist, but he made his mark as a businessman, perceiving a vast market for a product that didn’t yet exist. ”
技术只有在其适合的市场中才能优势尽显。硅谷故事也并非是简单的技术和科学，而是商业。
“Jim Keller, the star semiconductor designer who’s widely credited for transformative work on chips at Apple, Tesla, AMD, and Intel, has said he sees a clear path toward a fifty times increase in the density with which transistors can be packed on chips. First, he argues, existing fin-shaped transistors can be printed thinner to allow three times as many to be packed together. Next, fin-shaped transistors will be replaced by new tube-shaped transistors, often called “gate-all-around.” These are wire-shaped tubes that let an electric field be applied from all directions—top, sides, and bottom—providing better control of the “switch” to cope with challenges as transistors shrink. These tiny wires will double the density at which transistors can be packed, Keller argues. Stacking these wires on top of each other can increase density eight times further, he predicts. This adds up to a roughly fifty times increase in the number of transistors that can fit on a chip. “We’re not running out of atoms,” Keller has said. “We know how to print single layers of atoms.”
“Neil Thompson and Svenja Spanuth, two researchers, have gone so far as to argue that we’re seeing a “decline of computers as a general purpose technology.” They think 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.”
摩尔定律还没停，未来50倍提升的路线，可以通过增加晶体管密度实现， GAA/全环绕栅极晶体管就是其一。