The House of Making Things: Leadership in Industry and Science in the Modern World

by Scott Meikle

Genres: Visionary & Metaphysical; Science Fiction; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

REVISED EDITION
Computer chip expert Scott Meikle offers a fresh take on a global industry and its future.
Computer chips are everywhere. The pervasiveness of the chip has thrust its development and manufacture onto the center stage of a global struggle for industrial supremacy. From the outset, the struggle has been an East-West competition.
Blending nuanced cultural and geopolitical insight The House of Making Things tells a perspective-shifting story set against the international race for dominance in chip manufacturing and technology.
Joint venture TeraSil and expat John Schmidt face a moment of reckoning. The crushing complexity and cost of leading-edge technology has pushed TeraSil’s partners to their limits. As coleader, John Schmidt must navigate through crossed objectives. But as he sits at the nexus of disputes over capital, manufacturing, and technology, he can’t stop a growing realization of who really has the upper hand in the battle for industrial might.
Author Scott Meikle draws upon decades of personal experience in an immersive narrative that brings to life the competition for success in the chip industry—and in the process, he shatters our narrowing Western perspective and delivers a broader understanding of the forces that are driving a global race for leadership in industry and science.

 

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Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: ZPOE

Print pages: 303

Sample

PREFACE

This is a story about the nature of making things and about the strategies of industry and science that support the making of those things. More generally, it is a story about the contest for leadership between East and West in the venues of industry and science. The specific setting is the computer-chip industry, because that is what I know. But I believe a similar story could be written about the manufacture of televisions, electric vehicles, and solar panels, the building of nuclear power plants, and multiple other enterprises.

That there is an East-versus-West contest in industry is not news. Stories of the contest are in the media every day. That the contest extends into basic science and innovation is less widely considered, but also not news.

The dialogue about this contest, so widely distributed, suffers from gaps, which, particularly in the West, amount to a lack of perspective. Simply, the dialogue in the West is confined to only one perspective: the Western one. This is a problem. Particularly as the tenor of the race intensifies, Western chauvinism acts like blinders, at best causing misunderstanding and at worst facilitating a complacency about the challenges before us.

I have written this book to offer a different viewpoint and to demonstrate the unipolar understanding that our Western chauvinism breeds. The goal is not so much to define a winning strategy. Combatants can decide that. Rather, the goal is to comprehend the contest for what it is. We need at least to understand how we got from there to here.

Why is the work of making things central to this story? Why is making things so important? In fact, as far as manufacturing goes, plenty of arguments are raised to the contrary: In an interconnected, market-driven world, our economy isn’t about manufacturing anymore. In this new vision, everyone should focus on their expertise, and supply chains can manage the rest. Software is more important than hardware. Innovation and developing intellectual property create more value than manufacturing. The list goes on.

I disagree with the list of arguments for two reasons. First, not all manufacturing is created equal, and some kinds—like chip manufacturing—are so specialized that concluding they should go elsewhere demonstrates something about ourselves beyond the scope of a market calculation. Second, we in the West never used to think this way. Our modern understanding of the role of manufacturing in an economy has come as part of a new wisdom that we’ve collectively foisted upon ourselves and that has every indication of being too clever by half. Our friends in the East aren’t buying into any of our theories, and that should worry us.

When we think of the East and their approach to business, we tend towards terms like “reinforcement of market principles” or “need for a level playing field,” as if it is just a matter of time to get everyone on the same page. The point of this book is to lay bare the chauvinism in this thinking. We’re not going to get everyone on the same page. At least, not until the West is able to look at the world through lenses other than those we’ve crafted ourselves.

Industry and science are born from culture and modes of learning. The chauvinism of which I speak takes a different view, a view that ultimately eliminates culture from the picture altogether. To accomplish my goal, I must credibly place industry and science in the context of the cultures of East and West and then demonstrate perspectives that make our chauvinism clear. I have chosen a narrative format pulling from my own experience as the only authentic way to accomplish the task. A traveler walking across an expansive and varied landscape should only

 report on what he sees. What follows is a story taken from a thirty-year career spanning East and West, encompassing university studies, corporate R & D, manufacturing, and business in the microelectronics industry.

The narrative can be imagined as three concentric circles, with the story line starting from the outer circle and moving into the center. The outer circle is industry, a practical realm with a familiar landscape, where chauvinism and the outcome of chauvinism are simpler to demonstrate. The section on industry, Part One, tells a story of East and West priorities that have defined direction and livelihoods in the chip business. Chip manufacturing is a good example of something that has largely left Western shores. What does that mean, and why have we given it away? I endeavor to answer these questions by demonstrating the scale of the chip industry and the complex cast of characters that share its stage.

The circle inside industry—or Part Two—is science, the foundational activity from which industry is built. From the West’s perspective, leadership in science and its partner, innovation, comprises an irrefutable legacy and unimpeachable bastion. I posit the opposite. Over the full span of history, leadership in science has constantly changed hands and is on the move again. We in the West are iterating towards a position where historical strength is eminently impeachable, and furthermore, we have tunnel-visioned ourselves into a corner, only enhancing our chauvinism. We may have once thought it preposterous that companies and universities in the East could ever be considered more creative than those in the West. Now, with culture removed, we’re unable to consider the question relevant.

Science is rather more of a concept than a landscape and has required a different approach in the narrative. In Part Two I have chosen to write a series of vignettes—once again dealing with the differences in Eastern and Western priorities—which, when combined together, are meant to draw a picture not only of different views on science but also of different momentums for leadership. It is not a given that the Western scientific tradition should stay in control.

The innermost circle—Part Three—is implicitly about Confucian and Aristotelian traditions and modes of learning, which form the basis for East and West, respectively, throughout the book. Part III is brief, using a single point of contrast to demonstrate once again my position that the West overestimates its legacy, underestimates the contest, and has engaged in a self-defeating hollowing-out process in the face of challenge. By finishing on a point of culture, I mean to emphasize we have a root and branch problem. It is that big.

I feel blessed to have lived in both the East and the West and hope that it has given me perspective. I’ve put my stories to paper because I think there is value in them. I want to move us all forward. Despite sometimes-dark prescriptio

ns, I fully believe progress is possible, and I will be completely satisfied if I’ve broadened the dialogue just a bit.

Finally, I have friends all over, and I’ve written with deep respect for all. The criticism in these pages is over my own house, which I’m allowed, and is not meant to extend beyond. If somehow my message is taken differently, please accept my apologies, as that was not the intent.

August 2017

 

BACKGROUNDThe Cast

THE IC

What is a computer chip, and what goes into its making?

A computer chip, also known as an integrated circuit (IC), is the brick and mortar of the digital age. Imagine an IC as a city. But instead of a city’s vast interconnection of roads and structures, imagine an equally vast network of microscopic wires and electronic switches. Next, replace the car-and-truck commerce of physical man with the invisible, electronic commerce of digital man. An IC is a city of electronic highways, intersections, and storage places that manages the business of the digital age.

The complex world of an IC exists on a small, flat piece of a miracle material called silicon. A single IC may be less than a square inch in size. How to build a computer chip? Compared to the square miles of a city, a chip is too tiny for hammers and nails. Microscopic wiring can’t be put down like a road, one section at a time, and electrical switches can’t be built like houses, one structure at a time. Rather, a computer chip is constructed all at once, with everything built in parallel and all structures envisioned from the beginning. It would be like first digging and pouring all the foundations of a city, then adding ground floors and roads, followed by second levels, and so on. But unlike a city, all is fashioned at a microscopic level, where a human hair would be akin to a dozen ten-lane highways. A computer chip is a microscopic city raised from the foundations, one layer at a time, by the modern invention of IC construction.

The world needs hundreds of billions of computer chips to feed the multitude of modern electronic devices. How to satisfy this endless appetite for the power of the IC? The solution has been to first learn how to build a factory to churn out billions of chips and then to build hundreds of factories to supply the hundreds of billions of chips. Thus it is that the world’s appetite for modern-day electronics has given rise to a fleet of computer chip factories.

And today’s factory fleet is indeed extraordinary. A manifestation of complexity unmatched in human history. An enterprise of incredible expanse, focus, and determination, bred to carry the economy of the New World, bringing forth modern electronic conveniences to a planet of seven billion people.

The British launched a merchant marine to serve their world. The modern era has launched the IC factory.

THE FACTORY

What does the IC factory world look like?

An IC factory is filled with broods of the most fantastic equipment of manufacture. Imagine the ovens and mixers of a bread factory—with their hoses, fans, and lines of supply—and multiply that by one million. The IC factory’s equipment comprises a potpourri of chambers, ovens, tanks, and platens fitted with robotic arms, electronics, pumps, chemical lines, gas lines, and computer controls designed to coat, etch, buff, flash, or clean towards the layer-by-layer construction of ICs on the substrate of construction: a twelve-inch-diameter silicon wafer.

Carefully laid power lines deliver megawatts of uber-stable electricity to the factory

to keep chambers and robots humming. Specialized steel and plastic lines course through the floors to deliver dozens of ultrapure chemicals and gases. A water system produces millions of gallons of pristine water to clean and cool. Huge vacuum pumps flush the chambers and ovens. Enormous fans circulate air through filters about the factory to keep the atmosphere ultraclean. Miles of track are strung above the machines for robotic cars to carry wafers from one machine to the next. Hosts of computers are put in place to choreograph one massive dance of manufacture.

The sheer scale and complexity of the IC factory make it a source of endless excitement and a manifestation of humankind’s most daring foray into the future.

THE PEOPLE

What kind of crew keeps the ship of IC manufacture moving?

Imagine again the British Merchant Service of old. And imagine the crew. Canvas and rope—the tools of their trade. Stamina and fortitude—their bona fides. Bending, tying, repairing, rejoining. Calloused feet and hands trained to grip rope and deck in all weather. A daily routine of coaxing the wind to push the ship ever forward. And an ingrained vigilance over the chaos never more than a rogue wave or snapped line away. The crew was a symphony of capabilities, cogs in a machine that moved an economy. An anonymous collective, armed with a shared pride in hard-fought skills unique to the setting and to the world.

The souls that crew the IC factory are equally masters of their own canvas and rope, the electronics, chemicals, mechanics, software, and hardware of the factory. They stand at the ready. On the one hand, days of monitoring, walking through the expanse of the factory floor, maintaining and repairing, in order to push the ship of manufacture incrementally forward. And on the other hand, with chaos never more than a glitch away, always vigilant, prepared to respond at any time to stabilize the factory and pull it back from the abyss. The crew of an IC factory is an orchestra of talent and skills, working to deliver a masterpiece of manufacturing prowess to the world.

They are an anonymous crew known solely by the manifestation of their efforts. No likes from social media posts to evidence their days. Only the electronic conveniences wrought from their efforts and borne into the lives of the modern world.

Where to find the crew for such a venture? Is some specific IC-factory school required?

Formal engineering, electronics, or mathematics is certainly necessary in many cases. But labor at an IC factory is less about specific, narrowly defined skills—both simple and advanced, technical and nontechnical—and more about a desire to join an ecosystem, to grow a humble beginning into a career. In many ways, the more raw, inexperienced, undirected, and spontaneous the worker, the better. The primary skill required is a character that can avail itself of the moment, lose the self to an organization, and be content with the spontaneity of letting the situation define the career. That is the raw material for an IC factory

LEADER AND MISSION

An IC factory needs a leader just as a ship needs a captain. And the leader has a mission.

An IC factory is a machine built for life at the edge. And just like any high-performance machine, it will break when pushed to run beyond its limits. It wants to break. The leader’s job is to push the machine to the absolute peak of performance without plunging the operation into the abyss of chaos. Leadership of a state-of-the-art IC factory is ubiquitous risk in real time and real life.

History paints colorful pictures of merchant marine captains braving stormy seas or running the gauntlet of a naval blockade. History remembers their efforts more than their names. The captains were the tip of the spear during their time. The IC factory leader is fighting at the tip of the spear of the modern age.

And what is the mission at the tip of the spear?

The baseline mission of an IC factory is to make the right chips at the right time with the right quality and cost. However, with so much capability invested in machines and people, the factory will be hungry. The factory will want more.

That “more” may be something straightforward like more output, lower cost, faster delivery, or higher technology, all to levels beyond what was initially envisioned. “More” will step further, leveraging accumulated experience and improved capabilities to capture components of an expanding ecosystem. Territory upon territory.

A ship of the line is a universe of capabilities, execution, and discipline. Plucky and fierce. Once built, the ship sets sail towards its mission, eager in anticipation that it will go beyond. Those who have made the investment design it that way. An IC factory is a modern-day ship of the line, with a leader standing at the helm.

BEYOND THE FACTORY

The fantastic world of IC manufacturing is made even more fantastic by the extended world it enables.

Consider first the factory and its environs. The infrastructure that supports, supplies, and surrounds an IC factory is as complex as IC manufacturing itself. The complexity begins with construction. Timing the delivery of all the materials, workers, and equipment is an infrastructure dance. Ensuring the correct movement of skills to piece the factory together is the choreography. The art of making ICs begins with the art of building the factory.

And what about the kilometers of advanced steel plumbing, the high-purity gases and chemicals? Some business must supply them. The advanced equipment, too. Capable enterprise must make, deliver, and assemble all the pieces and

 parts. And when the materials or equipment have problems beyond the skills of the factory crew to fix, surrounding enterprise must deliver the solutions. Able seamen don’t perform major repairs. An army of workers stands ashore, at the ready to replace masts or repair the hull.

An IC factory works the same way. Surrounding the factory is a company of workers on call. Trained people with their own specialized toolboxes to overhaul the equipment, repair electrical circuits, replace chemical lines, or service robots. Nearby storehouses with valves, switches, and tubes categorized and packaged for delivery at a moment’s notice. Restaurants, hotels, cafés, and bars serve the comings and goings of many. Roads, bridges, and train lines network a growing colony. An economy is created.

There is more. The IC factory ecosystem is not static. As with a living being, it develops and diversifies with time. The high-purity steel, the chemicals for the IC factory—they may initially come from far away. But over time, a new supply is generated nearby. The skills to repair a complex machine may be imported from overseas. But in time, local schools train a new workforce. Engineers who focused on the task of moving a wafer in the factory expand their skills to move a product to a customer. The IC factory inevitably sparks a biosphere of diversification towards new industry and opportunity.

And still more: the factory itself is not a one-off event. The vision and resolve that drove the first investment is a seed planted with an eye to the future. Infrastructure in and around the factory feeds on itself. Factories beget factories. Before long there is a fleet.

And a fleet is a different thing. A fleet is a purpose. A fleet has scale and power well beyond humble beginnings. Now the owners and dispensers of capital have something more, something new to wield.

An IC factory fleet, particularly if it is the biggest fleet, has a lot to say about the direction of the region it controls. Once strong enough, a fleet will naturally begin to control the materials, machines, designs, and technology that feed into it (and incrementally take control of the products, services, and electronic contrivances that go out).

Once there is a fleet, infrastructure, and an ecosystem of new businesses besides, there comes a final deliverable from the factory: an ethos. That ethos, which begins as an unspoken consensus, grows into an overt cry: “I am from a house of making things.” A house that makes ICs, the brick and mortar of the digital age. The house that leads the next march forward.

CHAPTER ONEThe Concoction of Capital

“It’s a Fast World.”

So read the back of the T-shirt on the jogger ahead. No doubt the front of the shirt completed the story, perhaps inspiration for a corporate team-building seminar. The distraction was fleeting, and John Smith accelerated past the shirt, his eyes refocusing on the pavement ahead.

Moments later, however, “It’s a Fast World” reappeared. His fellow runner had clearly taken up the challenge. My metaphor for the day, thought John. Yes, it is a fast world out here, and my Asian compatriot isn’t about to let me dictate the pace.

“Out here” for John Smith was Xiahu, an energetic metropolis of three million in the heartland of modern-day Asian industrialization. Xiahu was home for John and his family, now going on four years. It was also the location of TeraSil Enterprises, a joint venture between Sun Yet Industries of Xiahu and Nutech Company of Iaston. An East-West venture, one could say.

John, an expatriate on assignment, was supporting the joint venture for Nutech.

By all accounts, TeraSil was a successful enterprise, a great factory pumping out hundreds of millions of computer chips and generating several billion dollars in revenue per year.

It was a partnership. Sun Yet provided the money, the infrastructure, and the people; Nutech provided the expertise and the technology. Both parties shared management responsibilities. As copresident, John spent most of his time on operations, leaving his counterpart from Sun Yet to deal with the banks, local authorities, and shareholders.

His run almost complete, John’s mind drifted to the day ahead. A normal docket of issues, he decided. Problematic managers, some underperforming factory metrics, and phone calls to the home office about new technology investment . . . Oh, and a visit to Xiahu Academy—

Screech!

A horn from a car peeling out of an underground garage shook John back to reality. Focus on the run, he chided himself. No point in becoming a statistic in the streets of Xiahu.

Ever an ambient drumbeat, the pulse of life in Xiahu had only quickened over his four years there. What was once a quiet street was now a busy arterial; simple thoroughfares were now tiered highways. What used to be a trot by a simple railway station was now a long roundabout past a subway-railway-bullet-train combination. All around was newly completed infrastructure or infrastructure in midbuild. A part of the quintessential, ordered chaos that one grew to expect in the Asian heartland

***

Vince Yueh, John’s counterpart from Sun Yet, greeted him as he exited the elevator onto the executive floor. “Did you see the morning papers?” Vince’s question forced John to halt.

Like John, Vince was on assignment to TeraSil, but unlike John, Xiahu was his real home. Vince was a longtime employee of the Sun Yet group. Through his tenure, Vince supported business development across multiple enterprises, with a particular focus on electronics and integrated-circuit-related manufacturing.

Given Vince’s background, an assignment to TeraSil was logical but also an enormous accolade, considering the scope of the enterprise. TeraSil’s chip-manufacturing business and associated technology were at the summit of Sun Yet’s march into electronics manufacturing. What began years back as a focus on simple components, like electronic resistors, had transitioned to circuit boards that housed the resistors and other components, then to the design of complex board systems such as those found inside a computer, and now finally to manufacturing chips or integrated circuits, the high-tech heart of all electronics. Vince was there every step of the way as a core contributor to Sun Yet’s strategy.

“Every day looks closer to a sovereign-debt default in southern Europe. Not good for the markets,” Vince complained. TeraSil was big business and required big investment. The next round of technology upgrades would be especially expensive, and TeraSil would need to go to the local financial markets for money. “I don’t like how this is going. Our banks won’t be happy. The next investment is already too expensive, and now with the market uncertainty they’re—”

“I know, I know,” interrupted John. “I have a call with Iaston tonight and will bring the cost up again.” John restarted his march.

Vince is right, thought John as he reached his office. The coming factory upgrade was too expensive. Even so, John was continually amazed by the local appetite for capital investment. And frankly, he doubted Vince’s line that his banks had misgivings about some sovereign-debt problem. The Asia spending machine was a gaping maw, devouring everything in its path. An endless pool of available capital fueling what had become the Wild West of modern-era industrialization.

Not necessarily a good thing, he thought. With so much capital flying around, many industries were overbuilt, leaving more supply than demand. And there was only so much need for new roads, bridges, trains, and airports.

Still, if the upgrade was expensive in Xiahu, it was expensive everywhere. And the money was available in Xiahu. No love from investors at home in bankrolling a costly factory. Not the right kind of return. Ironic, John mused. After four years away from the head office, he’d become a forgotten piece of the corporate hierarchy, but was now thrust back into prominence by his proximity to money—an unplanned benefit of hitching a ride on the grand corporate strategy that carried to Asia the responsibility of matching capital to making things. ...