TL;DR
I thought Chip War by Chris Miller was fascinating. It reads like a geopolitical soap opera, and it looks like we're about to enter a climax (or a new chapter at least).
It covers a lot of the developments throughout its short history from silicons triumph over steel in warfare, scaling and mass production, soviet spies and theft, East Asia's rise, intense competition and efficiency gains, continual innovation (Moore's Law), globalization of supply chains, centralization issues, increasing dependency and increasing demand. The last part of the book is about China's rise as well as the geopolitical ramifications for the worlds most valuable manufacturing company based in Taiwan.
One of the interesting things I found were how the most technologically advanced companies became centralized through tough competition and specialization. I think it's a must read for every Bitcoiner to get somewhat of a parallel perspective in an industry that is quite fundamental to the mining industry.
Here are some small snippets to give you a taste of what the book is like:
Early Booming Industry and Competition for Talent
Alongside new scientific discoveries and new manufacturing processes, this ability to make a financial killing was the fundamental force driving forward Moore's Law. As one of Fairchild's employees put it in the exit questionnaire he filled out when leaving the company: "I...WANT...TO...GET...RICH."
The Soviets Failed Copy Silicon Valley Strategy
Soviet leaders never comprehended how the "copy it" strategy condemned them to backwardness. The entire Soviet semiconductor sector functioned like a defense contractor - secretive, top-down, oriented toward military systems, fulfilling orders with little scope for creativity. Thanks to the "copy it" strategy, the USSR started several years behind the U.S. in transistor technology and never caught up.
TSMC Taking Risks to Kill Competition
He (Morris Chang) announced several multibillion-dollar increases to capital spending in 2009 and 2010 despite the crisis. "It was better to have too much capacity than the other way around." Anyone who wanted to break into the foundry business would face the full force of competition from TSMC as it raced to capture the booming market for smartphone chips. "We're just at the start," Chang declared in 2012, as he launched into his sixth decade atop the semiconductor industry.
ASML Specialization of EUV Machines
No doubt the Chinese government has deployed some of its best spies to study ASML's production processes. However, even if they've already hacked into the relevant systems and downloaded design specs , machinery this complex can't simply be copied and pasted like a stolen file. Even if a spy were to gain access to specialized information, they'd need a PhD in optics or lasers to understand the science - and even still, they'd lack the three decades of experience accumulated by the engineers who've developed EUV.
How China Played The Chip Industry
One U.S. semiconductor executive wryly summed things up to a White House official: "Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor."
Moore's Law
Carver Mead, the Caltech professor who coined the phrase "Moore's Law," shocked the world's semiconductor scientists with his prediction half a century ago that chips might eventually contain 100 million transistors per square centimeter. Today, the most advanced fabs can squeeze a hundred times as many transistors on a chip than even Mead thought possible.