Asianometry

Let me ask you something. You probably have heard all the news about this or that car factory shutting down because of the global chip shortage. That nobody can get the car they want because of a tiny little chip. 

And you might be wondering. When did semiconductors matter so much to today's vehicles? 

Why do we need to turn our cars into computers? Why can't things just be simple? What are all these electronics actually *doing* for our cars? 

In this video we are going to go into the automotive supply chain and their semiconductors. The specific focus will be on conventional cars. But if this video does well enough, perhaps we can do a version for electric and autonomous vehicles.

New Zealand's biggest company, by far, is a dairy co-operative. With $14 billion USD ($20.6 billion NZD) total revenue in 2021, Fonterra Group is the country's juggernaut. 

A dairy company does way more than milk. And over the years, Fonterra has evolved and grown along with the New Zealand dairy industry to become a globe-spanning food giant. 

In this video, we are going to look at New Zealand’s biggest exporter and a cornerstone of its economy.

One of the bigger things that happened in 2020 was that two countries - Azerbaijan and Armenia - fought a war. The war lasted for about 6 weeks, and it has set the air defense world ablaze. 

For the first time, the world got to see a national army bring a fleet of armed drones to the battlefield. And the impact those drones have made was huge. 

Using a swarm of cheap Turkish drones and Israeli loitering munitions, Azerbaijan swept aside Armenia's air defenses and paved a road to victory. 

Cheap armed drone technologies are spreading like wildfire across the world. In this video, I want to look at how such drones add new wrinkles, opportunities and challenges to modern warfare. 

In 2018, TSMC broke ground on Fab 18 near Tainan City in the south of Taiwan. Fab 18 is a monster. It sits on 103 acres and has a total floor space of 950,000 square meters (10.2 million square feet). That is about 3 times the size of AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Texas - home of the Dallas Cowboys. 

In total, across all of its phases, Fab 18 will cost TSMC nearly $20 billion to build and operate. More than the cost of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy's most advanced aircraft carrier. 

In this video, we are going to look at why TSMC's fabs are getting bigger and more expensive than ever before. And why that makes a lot of economic sense for the Taiwanese chip maker. 

Machine learning has been in the news a lot lately. Some of the early hype has died down, but the trend still lives on. And now it has really started to make waves in the chip design world. 

Machine learning and AI in chip design is such a sprawling field that I started to lose myself in all the research. So I figured to just go into a recent breakthrough in the chip design field: Floorplanning. 

Google has been applying the same AI prowess that allowed them to badly beat the best Go masters to this obscure, but important sub-category of the field. 

Right now, Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography is working. Foundries are using dozens of these $150 million machines to create amazing patterns nanometers wide. 

The industry labored for decades on this intricate technology. But there is no time to rest. ASML is already looking ahead at the next generation of EUV: High-NA EUV. The centi-million dollar machine that will be better than regular EUV. 

In this video, we are going to do a deep dive into what’s next in the world of EUV. ASML's follow-up to the most complicated nanolithography system ever delivered. 

In July 2021, Evergreen Marine took possession of the world's biggest container ship: the Ever Ace. 

Built for Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine, the ship is as long as the Empire State Building is tall from bottom floor to roof. 

With a carrying capacity of 23,992 twenty-foot-equivalent units or TEU, these Evergreen A-class megaships take the record - set just the previous year - from HMM's Algeciras-class ships. 

It can hold 10% more cargo than the infamous Ever Given, that one ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. 

These ships herald a new era of ultra-large container ships. And it is a bit of a surprising trend. What is pushing these container ships to get bigger? And is there anything keeping them from getting even bigger down the line?

In 1968, the British government arranged a shotgun marriage between three computer manufacturers to create International Computers Limited, or ICL. 

The government envisioned ICL as the United Kingdom’s answer to IBM - a national champion in computers. But the company could not compete against American and East Asian competition and eventually sold to Fujitsu. 

The United Kingdom pioneered computing technology. So why did ICL fail?

In this video, we are going to trace the history of the British computing giant from its punched-card days to its final demise in 2000. Sit back and relax. This is going to be a long one. 

In the 1990s, western scientists were allowed to study a series of fossils from a dig site in west Liaoning, China. What they saw would blow their minds: 

One of the most famous fossil beds ever discovered in history. A finely preserved slice of life from 120 million years ago. 

And within this treasure trove, a unique creature. A dinosaur that would make headlines around the world. 

I have been a dinosaur fan ever since I was a kid. I am excited to dive back into the field once more. In this video, we are going to look at China's contribution to our understanding of the dinosaur theory of birds.