Ask HN: Best books to understand semiconductor business?
I've worked in tech a long time but always on software/internet side. Looking for some good books or guides to understand the semiconductor industry. Any suggestions?
https://x.com/clarksquarecap/status/1703495357940822207?s=46
"semiconductor" "primer" "Important Disclosures" filetype:pdf
If you know anyone who works at a hedge fund or investment bank, you can ask them to grab some primers for you. All the big banks produce them for the major industries they cover. But they usually watermark every page of the report with the name of the client to discourage people from sharing more widely.
In the end it is not about the semiconductor business - just hits several aspects of it at the periphery.
Some representative paragraphs from the book. Some people probably like this style, but it's not for me.
> In 1985, Taiwan's powerful minister K. T. Li called Morris Chang into his office in Taipei. Nearly two decades had passed since Li had helped convince Texas Instruments to build its first semiconductor facility on the island. In the twenty years since then, Li had forged close ties with Texas Instrument's leaders, visiting Pat Haggerty and Morris Chang whenever he was in the U.S. and convincing other electronics firms to follow TI and open factories in Taiwan. In 1985, he hired Chang to lead Taiwan's chip industry. "We want to promote a semiconductor industry in Taiwan," he told Chang. "Tell me," he continued, "how much money you need."
...
> Lee Byung-Chul could make a profit selling almost anything. Born in 1910, just a year after Jack Simplot, Lee launched his business career in March 1938, a time when his native Korea was part of Japan's empire, at war with China and soon with the United States. Lee's first products were dried fish and vegetables, which he gathered from Korea and shipped to northern China to feed Japan's war machine. Korea was an impoverished backwater, with no industry or technology, but Lee was already dreaming of building a business that would be "big, strong, and eternal," he declared. He would turn Samsung into a semiconductor superpower thanks to two influential allies: America's chip industry and the South Korean state. A key part of Silicon Valley's strategy to outmaneuver the Japanese was to find cheaper sources of supply in Asia. Lee decided this was a role Samsung could easily play.
...
> Vladimir Vetrov was a KGB spy, but his life felt more like a Chekhov story than a James Bond film. His KGB work was bureaucratic, his mistress far from a supermodel, and his wife more affectionate toward her shih tzu puppies than toward him. By the end of the 1970s, Vetrov's career, and his life, had hit a dead end. He despised his desk job and was ignored by his bosses. He detested his wife, who was having an affair with one of his friends. For recreation, he escaped to his log cabin in a village north of Moscow, which was so rustic that there was no electricity. Or he'd simply stay in Moscow and get drunk.
1. China rapidly catching up
2. Companies can produce competitive offerings with old manufacturing processes
He took a manufacturing heavy view, but actually open archs like RISC-V or ARM's china division defecting provided avenues to make competitive offerings with last generation technology.
fastest chip today runs on 4 year old silicon: https://www.eetimes.com/groq-demos-fast-llms-on-4-year-old-s...
I also read "A History of Silicon Valley" back in college (~2010) and really enjoyed it; looks like it's been updated continuously since then: https://www.scaruffi.com/svhistory/sv.html
For a broader view of the industry, "Semiconductor Basics" by Christopher Saint and "Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created" by Jeffrey Zygmont are good choices.
These books offer valuable insights into the semiconductor world from various angles. Happy reading!
https://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Life-Times-American/dp/159...
This appears to be out of print. I read it a long time ago when it was new. I enjoyed the book.
One of the things that I remember from it was how Intel really overestimated how quickly video calls would take off. They thought that video calls would be the "killer app" for desktop computers in the late 1990s / early 2000s.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation is a 2012 book by Jon Gertner that describes the history of Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, as well as many of its eccentric personalities, such as Claude Shannon and William Shockley. It is Gertner's first published book.
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/ebooks/PM/Optical-Lithogr...
'Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age', Riordan.