For a long time, the semiconductor industry's primary economic engine was Moore's Law. An internal benchmark of doubling the number of devices on an integrated chip every 18 months.
Broadly speaking, three engines drove these advances. Semiconductor design, increasing wafer sizes, and lastly, lithography.
Improvements in optical lithography techniques have been the true driving force behind producing faster and faster chips. But coming up to the new millennium, it became clear to everyone that the lithographic train of progress was braking to a slow halt.
Was there enough left in the tank for one last ride?
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17:44
China‘s Iron Grip on the Rare Earth Magnet
Recently, the People's Republic of China banned the export of rare earth magnet production technologies for national security interest.
Note, not the particular rare earth magnets themselves. The technologies that produce them.
There are 18 rare earth elements - the 15 lanthanides as well as yttrium, scandium, and lutetium. They have wide technological and commercial uses.
Most of these use cases are small - the OEC values global rare-earth metal compound trade volume in 2021 at about $2.7 billion - but they are vital. Thus why we call them the "vitamins" of the tech economy.
But one use case in particular stands out to me over all the others: Magnets.
And China's tech export actions hint at their strategic importance.
In just a few years, China won a near-complete monopoly on the production of these unexpectedly critical magnet materials.
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19:00
Crony Capitalism Built Indonesia's Biggest Business Empire
At its peak, Indonesia's Salim Group was a $22 billion giant - the country’s biggest business group.
Its founder and top boss Liem Sioe Liong - also called Sudono Salim - was Southeast Asia's richest man.
Salim Group's incredible rise came on the back of the company’s personal connection to the authoritarian leader Suharto.
A personal friend of Liem, the dictator leaned on the company as one of its core collaborators.
Few companies dominated a single country like Salim's companies did Indonesia until the Asian Financial Crisis. This is its story.
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28:51
TSMC's First Breakthrough: The Copper/Low-K Interconnect Transition
Building a few houses isn’t enough to make a neighborhood. You also need to build the roads and sidewalks to connect them.
Same with an integrated circuit. You can stick a billion transistors on an IC, but they are useless if you cannot also connect them.
That is what interconnects are for. They are wires for transmitting the electrical signals between transistors and other circuit elements.
For over 30 years, we used to make these interconnects and their insulating layers from aluminium and silicon dioxide, respectively.
But by the late 1990s, it became technically necessary to use new materials. Big technology transitions are opportunities for certain companies to pull ahead of the rest. In this case, that certain company was TSMC.
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34:49
The Rise and Reign of Japanese VCRs
Americans invented the video magnetic tape recorder.
But it was the Japanese who brought it to the masses as the VCR.
Throughout the 1980s, virtually every home VCR sold in America was made in Japan. Even the ones sold by American brands like RCA.
How did Japan come to dominate a device they didn’t create? Today, we are going to look at the rise and reign of Japanese VCRs.
Ireland