I recently read Chris Miller’s non-fiction historical tour of the semiconductor industry, Chip War [1]Spanning nearly eight decades, from the invention of the vacuum tube and the IC all the way to the present post-COVID day, Miller deftly snapshots the semiconductor industry over the years threading together several narratives that explore innovation, competition, culture, and politics. It’s well worth reading for any electrical engineer—and it’s not hard to think about the parallels to today’s power electronics industry. While the book presents many interesting tidbits and themes, I keep coming back to this one insight. Miller notes that three things had significant ramifications on the lithography industry, a backbone of semiconductor processing: “engineering, business and geopolitics”—which is a great description of what I want to analyze in this column (Figure 1). When more and more of my newsfeeds are full of seemingly disparate factoids and figures (sometimes with AI generated articles), context is key. As we celebrate the 10 year anniversary of this magazine, let’s examine some things to track over the next 10 years. Keep an eye out for these topics in future columns—they already relate to past columns (which are all available online, whether or not you’re an IEEE member or magazine subscriber).
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https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10723190
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