Jon Y (Asianometry) on Problems And Progress in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Jon Y is the creator of the Asianometry YouTube channel and accompanying newsletter. He describes his channel as making “video essays on business, economics, and history. Sometimes about Asia, but not always.”

In this episode we talk about:

• Compute trends driving recent progress in Artificial Intelligence;
• The semiconductor supply chain and its geopolitics;
• The buzz around LK-99 and superconductivity.

Jon’s recommended reading

• The History of Semiconductor Engineering by Bo Lojek
• Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia by John Matthews and Dong-Sung Cho
• Handbook of East Asian Entrepreneurship by Fu-Lai Tony Yu and Ho-Don Yan

More resources

• Asianometry has its own playlists, including Semiconductor “Course” and Computer History, which are great places to find relevant videos

  • In this interview we especially drew on The Coming AI Chip Boom, How Nvidia Won AI, and AI’s Hardware Problem
  • We also mentioned LK-99 Wouldn’t Have Changed Semiconductors Anyway, How China Got the Bomb, and India’s Semiconductor Failure

• Semiconductor blogs

  • Fabricated Knowledge [blog]
  • Semi Analysis [blog]
  • The Chip Letter [blog]
  • China Talk [blog/podcast]
  • SemiWiki [open forum]
  • SemiEngineering [news site]

• Other related podcast episodes

  • Chris Miller on the History of Semiconductors, TSMC, and the CHIPS Act
  • Jaime Sevilla on Trends in Machine Learning
  • Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after