There's nothing more complex or expensive when it comes to manufacturing right now, which is why there's only a couple of companies that can afford it and even fewer that can actually undertake these capabilities in a high-volume

manufacturing process.

And the key to making chips is not just

that you're making one transistor that's coronavirus size,

it's that you're making them by the billions, literally by the billions for 50 or 100 dollars,

which is the price of a typical chip in a smartphone.

I'm Mary Long and that's Chris Miller, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

He's also the author of the best-selling book, Chip War, The Fight for the world's most critical technology.

Ricky Mulvey caught up with Miller to discuss the link between semiconductors and the printing press,

what it takes to build a chip the size of the coronavirus,

and the geopolitical implications of the AI arms race.

Chris, I'm really interested in the story of T.S.M.C. Taiwan Semi.

It's one we haven't really told on the show but I think it has to start

at the separation of fabs and chips. Maybe the starting point for that is what Lynn Conway and

Carver Meats saw. Well, before then, almost all chips were designed

and manufactured by the same companies.

But they realized that as chips were getting more complex to design and more complex to manufacture,

that there'd be benefits to splitting these two processes, sort of like how authors

don't write and print books themselves.

Gutenberg figured out how to mechanize printing

and now they're done by different groups.

The same thing happened in chips.

...