Chip Wars by Chris Miller — Part III — why smaller is better

The following quote from part II says it all — “As Silicon valley crammed more transistors onto silicon chips, building them became steadily harder.    Russia stole the equipment to make them, but they had no way to get spare parts.  The Russian military didn’t trust the chips produced in country, so they minimized the use of electronics and computers in military systems.    The math they put into  their guidance computers was simpler to minimize the strain on the onboard computer.”

The more transistors you put on a chip of a given size, the more computing it can do in a given time, particularly when time is of the essence with missiles, and artillery.  So making transistors smaller and smaller makes them able to do more things and faster as well.

The non-techies can skip the rest, but it’s too fascinating (to me at least) to see how it’s done.   Please note that most of this material is based on Miller’s book.

As of 9/22 “The smallest transistor size that has been used in commercial central processing units (CPUs) or graphics processing units (GPUs) is currently 5 nanometers (nm). Several semiconductor companies, such as Intel, AMD, and TSMC, have released or are in the process of releasing CPUs (central processing units) and GPUs (graphics processing units) with 5nm transistors.”

I’m a chemist and chemists think in Angstroms, because the smallest atom (Hydrogen) has a diameter of 1 Angstrom.  A nanoMeter is 10^-9 meters (a billionth of a meter), and 1 nanoMeter is 10 Angstroms.

The nearest neighbor distance between silicon atoms in crystalline silicon is 2.35 Angstroms (which has the diamond structure of carbon which is a tetrahedral structure — the angle between bonds in a tetrahedron is 109 degrees, so the distance between any two silicon atoms linked by a common silicon atom is 2 times sin 54.5 (.814) times 2.35 or 3.8 Angstroms), so the actual number of atoms along a distance of  500Angstroms  (5 nanoMeters) in a silicon crystal is only 132 !  That’s how small lithography at this distance is chopping up Silicon.  Get much smaller than this and quantum mechanical effects come in to play (if they aren’t there already)

The smallest wavelength of visible light is around 4,000 Angstroms.  Waves will only be reflected by something of the order of their wavelength. Surfers ride waves in to shore, but they don’t change the speed or direction of the waves they ride.  Essentially waves can’t ‘see’ the surfers riding on them.

Similarly to ‘see’ and carve objects as small as 500 Angstroms, you need light of much shorter wavelength — called extreme ultraviolet light (EUV).  Producing such light isn’t easy — here’s how it’s done currently. To be honest the book calls EUV 135 nanoMeters, and doesn’t explain how this could make features nearly 3 times smaller (50 nanoMeters)

Producing  EUV requires pulverizing a small ball of tin with a laser.  A 30 micron ball of tin moving at 200 miles/hour was shot twice with a laser: the first pulse to warm it up, the second to vaporize it into a plasma with a temperature of 500 kiloKelvin.  The process is repeated 50,000 times each second to produce enough EUV to fabricate a chip.  The lasers produced to do this contain 457,329 parts.   Cymer, a company founded by two laser experts in the USA does this.

Focusing EUV to carve patterns on silicon requires extraordinarily precise optics done by Zeiss. The mirrors to reflect the EUV are the smoothest objects ever made.

The EUV lithography machine has hundreds of thousands of components that took 10s of billions of dollars and several decades of research.   The machines cost 100 million dollars each.

Zeiss is in Germany, ASML ,the company that makes the lithography machines is in the Netherlands, Cymer is in the USA, so it is impossible for a single country to duplicate the supply chain for EUV.  The book contains an estimate that it would cost China 1 trillion dollars to do this for computer chip production, and there is no guarantee that politics wouldn’t get in the way (as it already has in China and Russia).

So, as I said, Chip Wars is really about manufacturing (of which I and probably most of the readership were blissfully unaware).

Next up:  Chip Wars by Chris Miller — part IV beating China with silicon will be much harder than beating Russia

 

Chip Wars by Chris Miller — Part II beating Russia with silicon

Just about everything in this post is from Chip Wars by Chris Miller, some are direct quotes, others are paraphrases.   A few things are my own, but they’re pretty obvious.

Even though I was vitally interested in computers as a neurologist starting in the early 70s and got one as soon as I could afford it (an Alpha Micro which I really couldn’t), Chip Wars covering the early history of silicon based computers taught me a lot.  It starts with Shockley’s invention of the transistor in 1948 and goes from there.   I won’t try to summarize that, but if you want an extremely well written early history of the period, read this book.  It isn’t dry and the personalities of the main characters are well fleshed out.

What I didn’t realize was just how much of the early development of silicon computers was driven by the military.  In particular Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a lot of academics and their research into computation. Today every chip company uses tools from one of 3 chip design companies founded and built by graduates of DARPA programs

Guided munitions during the early Vietnam war used vacuum tubes that were hand soldered (Sparrow III) they broke down 2/3 of the time only 10% hit their target.  Bombs fell 420 feet from target.    Some 800 bombs had tried to take out a bridge in Vietnam and failed.   A set of wings was added to direct the bomb’s flight along with a laser guidance system which worked as follows.  A small silicon wafer was divided into 4 quadrants and placed behind a lens.  The laser reflecting off the target would shine through the lens onto the silicon,.  If the bomb veered off course one quadrant would receive more of the laser’s energy than the others and circuits would move the wings to reorient the bomb’s trajectory so the laser was shining straight through the lens.    A simple laser sensor and a few transistors made the bomb accurate.  This was 1972.  Spoiler alert — we still lost.

Photolithography is a crucial technology for drawing circuits on silicon, and it is mentioned many times throughout the book.   It’s basically a simple idea— turning a microscope lens upside down to make something big look smaller.  It was initiated by  Lathrop at Texas Instruments in 1958  It took thousands of experiments and a lot of interaction with suppliers etc to make it work.   There will be much more about photolithography in the next posts.

When owning a copy machine was a crime and no one without security clearance could use a computer, Russia had no way to educate a truly huge number of computer programmers.  So they basically used espionage to copy our technology.

This didn’t work.   The Soviet copy it strategy was flawed, because they couldn’t scale up the manufacturing process reliably, something Grove at Intel and Chang at Texas Instruments fixated on and spent countless hours improving.  Moreover the US had access to technology in optics, chemistry purified materials.  They knew the temperature at which chemicals needed to be heated or how long photoresist should be exposed to light.  Every step of the process of making chips involved specialized knowledge that was rarely shared outside a specific company — often not written down.    So it couldn’t be stolen.

As Silicon valley crammed more transistors onto silicon chips, building them became steadily harder.    Russia stole the equipment to make them, but they had no way to get spare parts.  The Russian military didn’t trust the chips produced in country, so they minimized the use of electronics and computers in military systems.    The math they put into guidance computers was simpler to minimize the strain on the onboard computer.

The copy it strategy left the Russians 5 years behind.

Russia’s defense chief of staff Ogarkov knew this and said in ’83 to Leslie Gelb  “The Cold War is over and you have won”.  Interestingly, Star Wars begun the same year is nowhere mentioned in the book.  It was derided as implausible, but the Russians knew they couldn’t match it.

The Soviets only customer for computers was the military, while the US had a large civilian market which created companies with a wide variety of expertise in everything needed for them (pure silicon wafers, advance optic for lithography).  The Russians also had no international supply chain. The Gulf War ’91 on Saddam Hussein — US smart weapons (Paveway) using more advanced electrons decimated the best equipment of Russia.

As I said in part I (https://luysii.wordpress.com/2024/03/10/chip-wars-by-chris-miller-part-i/) Chip Wars is really about manufacturing, not the abstract computational problems and programming I was interested in.

The denouemont came in 1991 with the Gulf War. US smart weapons (Paveway) using more advanced electronics decimated the best equipment of Russia.

Things haven’t changed much in Russia. p335

“The fact that Russia faced shortages of guided cruise missiles within several weeks of attacking Ukraine is partly due to the sorry state of its semiconductor industry.”

Next up: The coming competition with China

Chip Wars by Chris Miller — part I

There are no loading docks in Washington D. C. said my brother who lives there.  He’s right.  D. C. doesn’t produce anything physical, as do most, if not all, people reading this blog.  I didn’t meet anyone involved in manufacturing until I was nearly fifty, and that only because the head of a local factory was an amateur cellist.

Chip Wars is an extremely important book.  I picked it up because it’s about computers, and neurologists are all interested in computers in the hope that understanding them will tell us something about how the brain works.  But Chip Wars is really about manufacturing and its contents should be read and understood by the general public and not just techies, although a technical background certainly won’t hurt, and I’ll assume you have some.   The larger and more important issues aren’t technical and the technical stuff can be skipped.

So this is a description of the contents of Chip Wars rather than a review, so I could now become president of Harvard having explicitly avoided plagiarism.

I also have skin in the game as one son and daughter-in-law and 2 grandkids  live in Taiwan, which is one of two places where the state of the art in computer chip manufacture is located (e.g. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company aka TSMC ).   The other is South Korea.   TSMC is probably why Xi hasn’t invaded long ago, and why the USA has a compelling (and nonpolitical) reason for protecting it (and Taiwan).

So what will follow in subsequent posts is a blow by blow description of the contents, with a few remarks by me.  You need to know how the USA came to its present sorry state in two crucial technologies, chip manufacturing and lithography.

Stay tuned.

A final true fact so improbable that it could never be put in a novel.  The brother of my cellist friend was a literature professor at Cornell taking over from Nabokov and my son took a course from him.

 

Biden looked good tonight

As a retired clinical neurologist, I’m often asked about President Biden’s mental competence.  I thought he did well in the debates with Trump 11/20 — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/first-debate-what-did-the-neurologist-think/

Tonight President Biden gave a long (1 hour and 7 minutes) State of the Union speech.  He showed no sign of dementia.  While he garbled a few words here and there, he was coherent throughout  — although he had teleprompters on either side of him.  In particular he remained vigorous throughout and not old and feeble.

I have been concerned that he might have occult hydrocephalus due to his ruptured intracranial aneurysm — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=6414&action=edit

One of the earliest signs of this disorder is a gait disturbance and I was watching for it.  Unfortunately, given the crush of people he waded through entering and leaving, he was unable to take more than a single step at a time, so no statement can be made about his gait.

In the early stages of dementia, people have good and bad days, but his performance tonight was reassuring that he can function as the President.

What if our most common assumption about Alzheimer’s disease is wrong?

Although the “Abeta protein aggregates cause Alzheimer’s disease” has had quite a run, it is not our most common assumption about Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Any guesses?

The assumption is hidden in the deep in the semantics of Alzheimer’s disease.  By simply naming it we are tacitly assuming that Alzheimer’s disease is just one thing.   The history of medicine is the history of splitting diagnostic categories with the passage of time due the accumulation of  causal knowledge.

Infections were characterized by the type of fever they produced before Pasteur.  Breast cancer was characterized by pathology before it was molecularly split depending which hormone receptors were present.  No one would dream of treating it all the same way today.

Yet here we have massive clinical trials of single therapies in Alzheimer’s disease because we don’t know any better.

Because people vary, in all clinical trials the responses to a given drug vary patient to patient. It is worth studying those responding best and those responding worst to a therapy in terms of the data taken on entry (MMSE, age, sex, education, pre-existing disease, smoking drinking, etc. etc.).  Such analysis might tell us something about the underlying causes in addition to predicting who will and who won’t respond in the future.

In particular, Cassava Sciences’ recent release of two years of open label Simufilam administration should be studied this way.  The second year is problematic as some dropped out, some continued to receive the Simufilam, some did not, but all patients still in the study at one year had been on the drug for a year, and their clinical data (ADAS-Cog etc. etc.) is in Cassava’s possession.

How did the group responding best differ from those responding the least.  Lindsay is too busy dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (courtesy of Science, the Wall Street Journal etc. etc.) to climb an academic totem pole to write it up.

I am particularly interested in the 5/50 patients Lindsay reported 8/21 who likely showed a 50% improvement at 9 months. As a clinical neurologist with decades of experience with demented patients, I never saw this degree of improvement at 9 months.  How did the 5 do at one year and, if continuing on Simufilam, how did they do at two years?   What was different about the 5 as a group vs. the 45 that didn’t do as well?

To have a look at the actual data Lindsay presented back then follow this link — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/cassava-sciences-9-month-data-is-probably-better-than-they-realize/

It passeth all understanding

While we were away in Taiwan we were mercifully away from the internet as well. So playing catchup in midFebruary, I was pleased to see that Cassava Sciences had released an open label trial of two years on Simufilam showing no cognitive decline in 47 patients with mild Alzheimer’s (defined as MMSE of 21 – 26) when a yearly decline of 3 on the ADAS-Cog would have been expected.  I thought that the stock would have exploded, but nothing happened.  It passeth all understanding.  Remember that two monoclonal antibodies have been approved by the FDA which decreased the rate of decline by 25 – 33%.  Perhaps the  patients in the antibody studies were sicker, as simufilam for 2 years didn’t help 32 patients with moderate Alzheimer’s (defined as an MMSE of 16 – 20) who declined by the expected 11 points on ADAS-Cog in 2 years.

Stabilizing early Alzheimer’s disease for 2 years is definitely a therapy worth having.  It will be fascinating to see what this group does in the next two years.

Perhaps the onslaught of negative articles in the press and Science have taken their toll and nothing Cassava Sciences says is credible.   Patient observation in the double blind placebo controlled study of Simufilam will be complete in the second half of this year, and analysis of the data (done by an outside group having nothing to do with Cassava Sciences) in a study of this sort usually takes 1 – 3 months, so we will have a definitive answer around New Year’s.  Note also that the FDA has accepted the way the study is to be performed, so there will be no requests for additional work at its conclusion.

Posting resumes

We’re back from a great 3+ weeks in Taiwan, seeing son, daughter-in-law and two grandkids we haven’t been in the presence of in 4+ years because of fears of COVID given our ages.  The next post will be a book review of “Chip Wars” which shows how Taiwan is literally  at the center of the computer hardware universe.  Unfortunately the company responsible (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) doesn’t permit tours or I would have gone.

The food was fabulous, but it certainly helped to have a Chinese daughter-in-law ordering in Mandarin. It’s amazing how much asians do with the simple cucumber and by stir-frying vegetables.

Our son likes Taipei better than Hong Kong — more room, more personal space and its easy to see why. Although both places have the same population (about 7 million), Taipei is far less mountainous and is in a broad flat valley, so there is much more room to spread out.

Just as Montanans are friendlier than the rest of the USA because they are more spread out, so are the Taiwanese.  I thought that some sort of neurologic disease was rampant because of all the brief head nods we saw, until our daughter-in-law told us it was a way of saying hello.

I also wondered about scooter gangs, as groups of 30 or so would barrel off when the lights turned red, but huge numbers of people have scooters and at cross roads there is a special area for them at the head of traffic.

Taiwan essentially has no crime, and all sorts of people are out and about at all hours, singly and in groups.  You stop looking over your shoulder after a week or so. The scooters are battery powered for the most part, and when a battery gets low you put it a charging station which has room for 50 or so batteries.  A program tells you which battery has the best charge, and you just take it out, pop it in your scooter and you’re on your way.  Of course you have to pay for this, and various rates are present depending on how much power you use.

My son asked an English exPat why they don’t have this in England, and was told that the batteries would all be stolen and resold.

We saw similar honesty in Osaka on another trip where hordes of bicycles take the place of scooters.  None of them were locked.

Buddhist temples abound, mixed in with commercial and residential establishments, which likely grew up around them.  There are no organized services where large groups get together led by clergy as in the West and midEast.  People just pray when they feel like it.   I did feel rather voyeuristic when we visited a  magnificent temple in the hills around the city.

There was a great lack of diversity outside of tourist spots such as the JehLiu geopark and Taipai Building, both definitely worth a visit.  I’d guess that in most places nonChinese westerners (and easterners such as Philippinos and Malays) account for at most 1 – 2%.  It was very different from what we are used to in the States.  It wasn’t threatening in any way.  As mentioned the people were quite friendly.

So there is a good word to be said for diversity, but not what DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) has become in the states — a way to indulge your inner bigot, discriminating against asians and Jews while feeling sanctimonious in the process.

Taiwan is tropical and mountainous and plant growth is riotous everywhere.  It is cloudy and rains a lot. Our son says that the weather is comfortable only about one month a year, during what passes for the Taiwanese winter (which is when ours is).  The rest of the time it is hot and sticky.

To end on a more positive note.  If you want to hear Jazz, go to Hong Kong, Taipei or Osaka where it is far more prevalent than the USA.  Talk about prophets without honor.

 

 

Posting pause

My wife and I are off to see son, daughter-in-law and 2 grandchildren  (ages 9 and 6) in Taiwan. So there won’t be any more posts until mid-February.

Due to the pandemic, we haven’t seen them in nearly 5 years.  Xi seems less likely to invade given the recent election.  One reason might be the fact that youth unemployment in China is 21% and Taiwan is 11% (youth in Taiwan is (rather broadly) defined as ages 15 – 29.

Penn’s Wokeness is nothing new

I graduated Penn Med in 1966 so I get the Alumni Magazine, Universities being relentless in their search for funds.   The following post appeared in March 2017.  See if you can figure out why the Penn Alumni Magazine of January/February 2017 was so peculiar before reading to the end

How diverse are thy articles oh alumni magazines

College Alumni Magazines love to brag about the wonderful things their graduates are doing. The recent Jan/Feb issue of one they send to me bragged about the exploits of two of their business school alums in the sports business, one graduating in 1968 the other in 1997. They also had profiles of 7 alums receiving awards at the 2016 reunions.

I didn’t get one even though attending my 50th medical school reunion. There was a lot of congestion as Donald Trump was attending the graduation of one of his kids while running for president. Our med school classmate and Nobel Laureate addressed the college graduation. He didn’t get an award either, they thought he had enough.

The issue also had room for a nice recipe for Chocolate Chip Banana Cookies.

There was also an article about the president of the school deciding what US laws the University would and wouldn’t obey, declaring the University to be a “Sanctuary”

In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the following dialog appears

Gregory (Scotland Yard): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

It wasn’t until I read the letters to the editor in the March/April issue, that I realized just what was curious about the Jan/Feb issue.

They failed to have an article about another graduate of their business school in 1968.

Donald Trump Wharton 1968.

The first United States President from the University of Pennsylvania in its 227 years of existence.

To be fair they did have an extremely wimpy note from the editor concerning why they didn’t have an article about Trump.

Ah diversity of thought and opinion in the Ivy League

Res ipsa locquitur

It’s been over 50 years since McLuhan noted “the medium is the message”.  It’s still very true

A third American Tragedy

The resignation of Claudine Gay as President of Harvard is the latest  of two very similar American tragedies occurring during my lifetime.  The first two were the subject of a previous post to be found after the ****.

It is particularly tragic in that it calls into question the hard work and sacrifices of all the blacks who have struggled to reach their present state.  Gay was chosen because she was female and black.  Her scholarly record was extremely thin, even without the 50 episodes of possible plagiarism which have shown up so far.  Clearly she wasn’t seriously vetted. Her response to congressional questioning was a disaster, and her failure to protect Jewish students was worse.   The race card will be played, as it was getting her in, but she was way over her head and had to go.

I think of the black girl two years behind me in my small rural high school who graduated 60+ years ago as salutatorian of her class, when by grades and merit she should have been valedictorian, but it wouldn’t do to have a black as valedictorian.  Later she became a high powered nurse with a responsible position, but how much farther could she have gone without the obstacles in her path.

Here are the other two American tragedies.

*****

When the team members entered the clinic, they were appalled, describing it to the Grand Jury as ‘filthy,’ ‘deplorable,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘very unsanitary, very outdated, horrendous,’ and ‘by far, the worst’ that these experienced investigators had ever encountered. There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff – long before Gosnell arrived at the clinic – and staff members could not accurately state what medications or dosages they had administered to the waiting patients. Many of the medications in inventory were past their expiration dates… surgical procedure rooms were filthy and unsanitary… resembling ‘a bad gas station restroom.’ Instruments were not sterile. Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed…”[29]
[F]etal remains [were] haphazardly stored throughout the clinic– in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers… Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent… were probably older than 24 weeks [the legal limit]… In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls. The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses. In the basement, they discovered medical waste piled high. The intact 19-week fetus delivered by Mrs. Mongar three months earlier was in a freezer. In all, the remains of 45 fetuses were recovered … at least two of them, and probably three, had been viable.”

A classic back alley abortion mill, except that it was all quite legal.

This wasn’t supposed to happen after Roe vs. Wade. It is so uncanny that the doc (Kermit Gosnell) convicted yesterday of these 3 infanticides graduated from a med school in Philly (Jefferson) the same year (1966) that I graduated from another (Penn). At the time Philly had 3 more (Hahnemahn, Women’s and Temple).

What is so socially tragic about Gosnell, is that he was one of very few blacks in medical school back then. Our class of 125 at Penn had one, but he was a Nigerian Prince. Whether Gosnell liked it or not he was a standard bearer for what we hoped (at the time) was the wave of the future (it was). For just how very few Blacks were being educated at elite institutions back then please see

Warren, Harvard and Penn — Sanctimony, Hypocrisy and Fraud

The second tragedy is a black woman M. D twenty or so years younger (Harvard undergrad, Penn Med followed by an MBA from Wharton) who lost her license to practice in NY State after she went off the deep end and became a holistic practioner (or whatever). She treated a new onset juvenile diabetic with diet and juice after which he came to the ER in diabetic ketoacidosis with a sugar over 300.

My father was an attorney as was my uncle, later a judge. They took it very personally when an attorney was disbarred for some malfeasance or another. I feel the same way when this happens to an M. D. Imagine how the black docs must feel about Gosnell, or the idiot, Conrad Murray, who basically killed Michael Jackson with Diprivan.

If you didn’t follow the link, I’ll close with a more uplifting ending from it.

My wife has a cardiac problem, and the cardiologists want her to be on coumadin forever, to prevent stroke. As a neurologist, having seen the disasters that coumadin and heparin could cause when given for the flimsiest of indications (TIAs etc. etc.), I was extremely resistant to the idea, and started reading the literature references her cardiologist gave me, along with where the references led. The definitive study on her condition had been done by a black cardiologist from Kentucky. We had a long and very helpful talk about what to do.

Diversity is not an end in itself, although some would like it to be. I’ve certainly benefitted from knowing people from all over. That’s not the point. Like it or not, intelligence is hereditary to some extent (people argue about just how much, but few think that intelligence is entirely environmental). The parents and grandparents of today’s black MDs, Attorneys, teachers etc. etc. were likely just as intelligent as their offspring of today. This country certainly pissed away an awful lot of brains of their generations.