Asianometry
Semiconductors and industrial history, sourced down to specific plants, equipment models and years; almost nothing like it in Chinese
20:31The Fab's Real Bottleneck Isn't the Lithography Tool — It's the OHT Cars on the Ceiling
What actually caps a fab's output is not only the lithography tools, but the OHT vehicles running back and forth along the ceiling. The 300mm transition made them mandatory, and today that market is a duopoly held by Daifuku and Muratec.
The Solid State Transformer Has Been Hyped for Fifty Years; AI Data Centers Are Its First Real Buyer
The solid state transformer failed three times over — in the navy, in high-speed rail, in the smart grid — because all it offered was ‘smaller’. The copper problem and the 800-volt DC problem inside AI data centers are the first reasons it has ever had to exist.
The incinerator boom was not an environmental victory — it was a business the power tariff made pencil out
A 2012 electricity tariff policy turned waste-to-energy from a money-loser into a profitable industry, and China built nearly 700 incineration plants in six years — only to end up with overcapacity and average utilization below 60%.
15:47TSMC Trucks Half-Finished Wafers Between Fabs: The Secret Weapon of AI Capacity
TSMC exploits the more than 90% tool overlap between N5 and N7 to truck half-processed wafers from its Tainan fab to Taichung for finishing, freeing up AI capacity while N5 converts to N3. The foundation of the AI boom is a fleet of ordinary trucks.
SK hynix's turnaround ran on customer relationships, not on HBM technology
SK hynix's comeback was not a bet on HBM as a technology but a bet on customer relationships and sustained investment; Samsung, betting on PIM for edge inference, happened to hand its rival the sole-supplier position at the ChatGPT moment.
20:29Subsea Fiber Is Becoming the World's Largest Listening Network: Not Spycraft, Physics
Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) turns ordinary fiber-optic cable into a continuous vibration monitor. Oil and gas well surveys, earthquake monitoring, whale tracking and anti-submarine ship detection all run on the same technology chain, and the ocean is rapidly losing its privacy.