China‘s Iron Grip on the Rare Earth Magnet

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?

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.

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. 

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.

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.

In the 1980s, Brazil had a large domestic computer industry. Dozens of Brazilian-owned companies - employing tens of thousands of Brazilians - producing tens of thousands of Brazilian PCs. In the 1970s, a small set of Brazilian government bureaucrats recognized the growing importance of the computer industry. And in a bold move, they reserved the most exciting part of that market exclusively for Brazilian firms. These protections helped develop an industry ... but only for so long. In this video, we are going to review the Brazilian computer industry.

After 20+ years of development, extreme ultraviolet lithography has become a commercial reality. As I write these words, multi-million dollar machines from ASML use EUV light to create impossibly small patterns in wafers.  This technological magic requires a powerful heart inside of it. And indeed, there is an amazing system driving ASML's $150 million lithography machine: The EUV Light Source.  In this video, we are going to look at the lasers firing pulses at tin droplets to create the powerful, 13.5 nanometer wavelength light for our latest, greatest microprocessors. 

I want to thank Alex Sludds of MIT for his help on this video: https://alexsludds.github.io/

Silicon is probably the single most studied element on earth. Over the past seventy years, people have researched more ways to cut it, etch it, grind it, clean it, crystallize it, polish it than almost anything else.  Engineers have done amazing things to turn this plentiful shiny rock into the century’s most impactful piece of technology. And the wafer industry needs some love for those achievements.  So in this video, we are going to talk about the decades of research and stunning engineering that have gone into creating today’s cutting-edge semiconductor wafers. 

When we last left Nvidia, the company had emerged victorious in the brutal graphics card Battle Royale throughout the 1990s.  Very impressive. But as the company entered the 2000s, they embarked on a journey to do more. Moving towards an entirely new kind of microprocessor - and the multi-billion dollar market it would unlock.    In this video, we are going to look at how Nvidia turned the humble graphics card into a platform that dominates one of tech’s most important fields: Artificial Intelligence.