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Asianometry
By Jon YTechnology
Asianometry episodes
- How Semiconductor Yields Vastly ImprovedFor decades, semiconductor fabs tolerated—and even expected—bad yields. Less than 50%, sometimes as low as 10%. Credible die yield data is rare, but here’s a market analysis from the late 1980s for the US Trade Representative during the US-Japan semiconductor dispute. It implies that when American and Japanese firms began 16K DRAM in 1978, yields were about 2%. Laughably low, but expected. And they stayed low. By 1984, US 16K DRAM yield hit 36%. Japan: 48%—better, still bad. Six years later! Now look at TSMC’s N5/N4 node, about 4–5 years old. Trade secrets, but N4 yields are around 80%. What’s going on? 6-micron process vs. 4-nanometer. The latter is far harder. Yet we’re hitting 80–90% yields. Is it a conspiracy? No—the fabs opened their third eyes. With new tools, they began inspecting and improving. In this video: how automated inspection tools revolutionized chip fabrication.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
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18 min - ASML’s Breakthrough 3-Pulse EUV Light SourceWhile attending an ASML presentation at SEMICON Korea, I noticed a tidbit on one of the slides. A key part of their future EUV roadmap has been growing the power source to 800 watts or more. But it had not been super clear to me how they were going to do that, other than maybe raising the speed of the tin pellets. Then I saw the slide and it showed something new, at least to me. Three laser pulses rather than two. Now how about that? No, this is not an Onion article. This looks to be real. In this video, I want to talk about lasers and EUV light sources. And how three is better than two.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
18 min - Quantum Compute with Single PhotonsLast year during my trip to Silicon Valley, I was invited to visit a company called PsiQuantum. When you think about quantum computing, your mind might conjure up those chandeliers. Qubits plunged to super cold temperatures. PsiQuantum is working on something a little different. Quantum computing using photons. In this video, a form of quantum compute with intriguing possibilities. Does it “work” like silicon does today? Is quantum compute really here? I can’t really answer those questions in this video. But we can explore the ideas and the ideas are certainly mind-bending.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
25 min - The Chinese Hamster Revolutionized MedicineWhat was the world's top selling drug in 2023? Maybe the magic weight losing drug semaglutide, better known as Ozempic? Or the COVID vaccine perchance? Nope. 2023's top selling drug was an antibody, Keytruda, with about $25 billion in sales. $27 billion projected for 2024. In fact, five of the top ten best selling drugs in 2023 were antibodies. Antibody therapies revolutionized medicine. We have long known they can. The problem has always been how to make them the right way and at industrial scale. Today it is done with the help of a hamster. Or rather its cells. In this video, the incredible story of the hamster that revolutionized medicine. This is one of my favorite videos of the year.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
21 min - The Global Vitamin CartelsVitamins are organic molecules that we need to survive. You do not need a lot of them, but if you go without them for too long then deficiencies result. And then you are going to be in for a bad time. Science helped us discover the magical life-saving properties of these vitamins. Engineering helped us scale and bring them everywhere. And cartels helped a few shadowy companies monopolize them for profit. This really happened. In this video, we look at vitamins and the secret, international cabal manipulating their prices for almost a decade.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
23 min - How Mexico Made a PlutocratCarlos Slim wasn't the first ever Mexican to be the world's richest man. That honor should probably go to Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer, the half-Mexican who discovered and ran the greatest silver mine of all time: the Valenciana Mine. That mine, by itself, was responsible for 60% of all the silver produced in the 18th century. So Slim has some ways to go. But I have always been fascinated at Mexico's wealth inequality. How did a country with 46.8 million people living in poverty also end up hosting one of the world's richest men? The answer is that they sold him a monopoly. In this video, the birth, development, and eventual sale of Mexico’s telephone industry.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
23 min - The Tariff Paradoxes of Latin America and AsiaI have been thinking about tariffs recently. No reason why, just interested. And while reading, I came across a series of interesting papers by economists Michael Clemens and Jeffrey Williamson. They explore what looks like an economic paradox. Up until World War I, the countries of Latin America were the most protectionist in the world, with some of its highest tariff rates. East Asia on the other hand - for reasons we will discuss later - had tariffs just a fraction as high. Yet during these decades, the Latin American countries grew faster than the Asian ones. Before World War I, one might argue that if you wanted faster economic growth, you needed high tariffs. Then things changed. In this video, high tariffs in Latin America. Low tariffs in Asia. One works the other doesn't, right? Time, context, and composition matter.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
18 min - How the EUV Mirrors are MadeWhen the semiconductor industry first started on EUV lithography, almost everyone believed that the optics would be the hardest things to do. Wavefront error—deviations of a light wave from its ideal—comes from imperfections in mirrors and lenses. A good lens aims for lambda/10 error; EUV optics must hit lambda/50. With EUV’s 13.5 nm wavelength, that’s 260 picometers. For context, a water molecule is 275 pm wide. That’s the total error budget—for the entire six-mirror system. Because errors add in quadrature, each mirror gets 106 pm rms. But mirrors double light deviation on reflection, so surface accuracy must be halved: 53 pm rms. That’s the radius of a hydrogen atom. It is 20 times harder for an EUV system with six mirrors to achieve the same wavefront performance of a DUV system with 60 surfaces. In this video, we go back to the machine you guys all know and love (again) and the finest multilayer mirrors ever made in history.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
20 min - How Moore’s Law Revolutionized RF-CMOSSilicon's rapid rise in Radio Frequency or RF applications is a lesson in the power of Moore's Law. Over twenty years ago, all the parts of an RF front end module were made separately and integrated in a box. Silicon changed all that. And helped make possible today’s slick and thin cellphones. In this video, the unexpected rise and quizzical future of RF-CMOS.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
19 min - China’s “New” EUV Light SourceSocial media is passing around an announcement that Huawei is testing a China-domestically developed EUV machine. This machine uses an EUV light source known as Laser-induced Discharge Plasma, or LDP. This is in contrast to ASML's method, which is called the Laser Produced Plasma or LPP method. It is claimed that LDP is much more efficient than LPP. Smaller, simpler and with better energy efficiency. Has ASML just been DeepSeek’d? I have been asked to speak on this via email and Twitter. I guess I have to do it. There is so little out there about how this machine works, so I am not going to speculate. But people have tried LDP before and we can talk about that. Feel free to extrapolate from there. In today's cope video, let’s take a look at the Laser-Induced Discharge Plasma EUV light source.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
16 min
About Asianometry
From the publisher's feed
Newsletter for the Asianometry channel. Studies on Asia - Financials, semiconductors, history, demography, development and other stuff.
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