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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?
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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.
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