The CHIPS Act: How much is a quintillion? A question of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Company has been thought to be stuck at just the chip level, even though it claimed to have produced some chips at the 14 and even 7 nm scale. U.S. experts told me, though, that China can’t mass produce these chips with precision without ASML’s latest technology — which is now banned from the country.
Because China is not trusted by the coalition partners not to steal their intellectual property, Beijing is left trying to replicate the world’s all-star manufacturing chip stack on its own with old technologies. It pilfered a lot of chip technology from TSMC.
This week I interviewed U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, who oversees both the new export controls on chips and the $52.7 billion that the Biden administration has just secured to support more U.S. research on next-generation semiconductors and to bring advanced chip manufacturing back to the U.S. Raimondo rejects the idea that the new regulations are tantamount to an act of war.
“We do not make in the U.S. any of the chips we need for artificial intelligence, for our military, for our satellites, for our space programs” — not to mention myriad nonmilitary applications that power our economy. The CHIPS Act is meant to strengthen our innovation community so that more of the most advanced chips are made in the U.S.
Lauren, one thing that we learned from reading your story is that I printed it out for myself after I took it in the bathtub.
Lauren Goode enjoyed every second of the 43-page document. One thing that I learned from reading your story is the importance of photolithography. Can you quickly talk us through how that works? And also, I’m very curious, how much is a quintillion? I want to know. I saw that word and I thought to myself, “I’m not going to google it, I’m just going to ask Virginia tomorrow.”
Lauren Goode. So this is in reference to the sentence, “Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries, the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan, carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple.” And I read that and thought, “What is quintillion?” So now we know. OK, but back to the photolithography. Why is this so important? How does this process work?
Virginia Heffernan: All right. The first chips that were made in the US could fit four transistors on them. You had some switches that have wires around them, with another switch that has wires around it and it conducts electricity among them. Then someone has the bright idea—someone whose name is known, but we’ll skip that—to put silicon, a little bit of silicon underneath it and make all those switches talk to each other by way of the semiconductivity of the silicon underneath them, and it’s four. OK? Then they start to realize, “Oh, you can shrink those transistors down a little bit here and there.” And it doubles at some point. Then Gordon Moore says, “From what I’ve experienced, this is going to double about every year, possibly every two years.” That becomes Moore’s law. And ever since then we’ve been shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, as you all know from chessboard—the chessboard double the grain of rice. This goes fast. In the early ’60s you were using four transistors and now trillions of transistors on the same chip. The size of your thumbnail contains trillions of transistors. Do you do that in the world? Well, you’re no longer using wax, which they used in the beginning, or a knife or a carving tool to do lithography like you’d do with Batik. You’d put the ink and it wouldn’t see the light of day because of the places it wouldn’t pass through. Until the light becomes light and the laser beam is more precise, the knife gets smaller and smaller. You know it’s down here, there are slow, low, loping wavelengths. There is radio all the way up to the visible spectrum. On the far right, X-rays are in there, microwaves are in there. But at ultraviolet, which is where they are now, they use extreme ultraviolet little knives with very small wavelengths, not the smallest but very small precise wavelengths. That’s the knife now, and that is what they do lithography with. So you picture Batik or some other kind of art lithography, done smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller until you are dealing with electrons and lasers and light waves and atoms, and that’s how you get a trillion objects on your thumbnail. They are smaller than the coronaviruses. These transistors—when I started writing by the way, it was like they could fit 11.7 billion on. I took that figure actually from a book that came out a couple years ago. By the time I was done writing, they had one with a trillion. That’s what frequent doubling will do for you. Lauren, you’re smiling right now and you can begin to taste the mind-blowingness of this. I don’t know what it is but a person gets a very particular smile when they think about atoms. It’s like so trippy. There’s atoms in everything, all mass. It’s just so cool and—