For some time now, the technological world has been immersed in a hidden struggle for the conquest of silicon. A contest in which the United States and China, the largest economic and military powers in the world, and Taiwan, the main global producer of advanced silicon, participate. Both are putting their commercial, technological and even military weapons on the board, to stay at the top of the technological development that revolves around this element.
Our entire digital life revolves around silicon and its possibilities. Look at your smartphone, your SmartTV and possibly even your coffee maker. If there is anything minimally digital about them, silicon is probably present. Without silicon our digital life would not be the same, since the development of advanced chips that make our lives so much easier depends on this material. Without silicon, many of the technological devices we use in our daily lives would not exist as we know them today.
Silicon, panacea of technology
We have been exploiting the possibilities of silicon for more than 60 years. The first semiconductor developed with silicon dates back to 1958 and we have even managed to manipulate its structure at the atomic level. But all these advances have also allowed us to know the limits of this material. Limitations that 60 years ago seemed very far away, but that we are reaching.
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This situation raises many questions. Who will get the latest technology? Who will create the next big viable alternative? While we ask ourselves these questions, we begin to see how the aforementioned countries want to continue being at the technological peak, but at the same time we begin to see the difficulties of continuing to advance, thereby slowing down innovation in many spaces.
Of vital interest
The main reason for the strong competition is related to the fact that silicon is vital for the civil and military industries. So whoever masters the most cutting-edge technology is the one who has the greatest and best civil and military technology. An example of this close relationship can be seen with the first chip created in 1958 by Texas Instruments, which was designed exclusively for the United States Army.
In this competition, it is clear that the United States is at the forefront, not only in the design of advanced chips, but in the generation of lithography technologies necessary to make such chips a reality. China, for its part, is about 10 years behind in some areas. In others, it is at least 20 years behind schedule. China’s own chip construction technology is barely around 90 nanometers.
In this sense you have to be very careful, since China has Western machines (created by the European company ASML) that allow you to work up to 45 nm with certain traps (a technique called multiple patterning). Thus, Chinese engineers have been able create chips up to 5nmbut they have a problem: They are up to 10 times more expensive and most chips have manufacturing problems.
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Sanctions, control and war
In this way, it can be better understood how United States sanctions to access more powerful machines have an enormous weight on China’s technological development. And it also explains why China is interested in reconquering Taiwan. We must not forget that Taiwan is the main chip producer in the world (using technology from the USA and Europe). The knowledge of your engineers and companies is vital to stay strong in the silicon battle.
Taking over Taiwan is a priority for China if not being relegated technologically, given that AI is beginning to further accelerate the development of chip technologies thanks to its ability to accelerate chip development, optimization and simulation processes.
NVIDIA, the leading AI chip development company, has said that AI helps develop chips 50 times faster than traditional methods. And China has problems in this regard, because both NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, They are prohibited from selling AI chips in China. That means that every year that China stays away from that technology, the technological gap with the West increases by 5 years and this clock began ticking in 2024.
reaching the limit
Another added problem is that silicon is reaching its limit. Currently, companies like TSMC or Samsung are investigating creating chips with a 3 nanometer node, but the limit of silicon is 1 nanometer. After that, silicon will no longer serve as an element to produce chips. When you reach 1 nanometer, the party is over, because reducing the size is impossible for technical and physical reasons. Obtaining other technology is essential, but we need more advanced computers that allow us to investigate new materials and methods to advance.
Whoever is left behind is relegated. We can see this very clearly in blockchain and AI, where silicon technology is beginning to show us its limits when it comes to continuing to advance.
Blockchain, the first affected space
In the case of blockchain, we see them in the the Proof of Work miners, who are no longer advancing in their power in great strides. If you have been in the crypto world for some time, you will know that when Bitcoin began mining, it was done on CPUs (made with silicon). The CPUs of 2008 were powerful, but they pale in comparison to our current CPUs. Then we move on to GPUs (in 2010-2011), where history repeats itself: current GPUs are more powerful. But, you will know that not even current CPUs and GPUs are suitable for mining, compared to ASICs, which are also manufactured with silicon.
Here we begin to see how silicon begins to show its seams. The initial ASICs advanced very quickly and it was not unusual to see how the new versions left the previous versions cornered. The new ones doubled their mining power, with less energy expenditure and greater profits for the miner.
Energy efficiency
For example, the AntMiner S7 had a power of about 4.73 TH/s and a consumption of 25W/GH, but the next iteration was the AntMiner S9, with a power of 13.5 TH/s and a consumption of 9W/GH. Currently we have been stagnant for about 4 years. It was in 2019, when Bitmain launched its AntMiner S19 Pro+ Hyd (water-cooled), with a power of 198 TH/s. In January 2023, Bitmain launched its AntMiner S21 with 200 TH/s, with only 30% lower consumption.
This means that In 4 years, AntMiner was able to optimize its miners to consume less energy, but at the level of raw power it was practically in a tie, leaving in the past that rapid evolution of power-energy consumption, which had accompanied ASICs until then. All this, despite the fact that the current silicon of AntMiner miners is 5 nanometers (in S21) compared to 14 nm (in S19).
AI opens our eyes
If blockchain shows us the limit of silicon, AI makes us completely rethink its use. Things like ChatGPT are very cool to look at, but they require a lot of energy to use. In fact, it is expected that by 2026, AI-related energy consumption will reach 460 TW/h. While the Bitcoin mining, so harshly criticized for its high energy consumption, will spend about 210 TW/h.
Silicon has a lot to do with this, because all this AI needs hardware to work. If we take into account that a NVIDIA H100 (the most powerful AI hardware so far) consumes 1200 Watts of energy, and with centers like Google and Microsoft installing hundreds of thousands of these cards, we can see where things will go.
Controlling silicon is vital, not only to maintain AI or blockchain, but also to maintain our digital lifestyles. We are going to need it for electric cars, for self-driving, to maintain the Internet and our data consumption/generation/analysis. Silicon has become the lifeblood of our digital lives.
After 60 years of advances, no one could have thought that a “piece of metallic earth”, such as silicon, was going to become one of the fundamental pillars of our civilization and the epicenter of a technological battle that affects blockchain and AI equally. .
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