Avsnitt
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In January 2025, ESKOM, South Africa's electricity monopoly, announced its first round of load-shedding in over ten months. Load shedding basically meaning rolling blackouts to prevent the grid from collapsing. 2024 had been a good year (relatively). Just 83 days of load-shedding. Not too bad after 332 days in 2023, and over 200 days of power cuts in 2022. ESKOM is one of South Africa's biggest companies. It is also arguably its most important. And it is in shambles. In this video, the story of a state-owned electricity monopoly that triggered an energy crisis.
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For decades, modern agriculture depended on fertilizing nitrates mined out of a South American desert. These mines were the world's only such sources of nitrates. So valuable that three countries went to war over them. These nitrate riches, monopolized by foreigners, were wiped away thanks to one of the most famous chemical processes in history. But it took longer than you think. In this video, the glorious nitrates mining boom, the countries who bled for it, the men who monopolized it, and the technologies that ended it.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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For nearly forty years, Chemically Amplified Resists or CARs (say it separately) dominated the semiconductor industry. But technological changes present opportunities for major industrial shifts. And the introduction of EUV is perhaps the biggest technological change in the past 10 years. EUV's rise has opened the door to a perhaps-revolutionary new photoresist, and two very interesting new players supporting them. In this video, we talk about the new metal oxide and dry resists, developed for the EUV era and beyond.
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Per Bloomberg, in 2024 lithium-ion battery pack prices fell 20% to $115 per kilowatt-hour. It is the biggest price cut since 2017. At these prices, it is cheaper to buy Chinese even with tariffs of 25%, 35% and perhaps 120%. Central to this trend are the price and technology developments going on in a specific type of battery: Lithium Ion Iron Phosphate or LFP. LFP batteries were once seen as cheap and low-end, suffering fundamental chemistry weaknesses. Leave it to China to engineer their way around such limits. In this video, one of the most revolutionary cost curves in energy history. China and the LFP.
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A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. Or to put it another way. A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second. A femtosecond is to a second what a second is to 32 million years. There are more femtoseconds in a single second than there are hours passed since the Big Bang. Fact, eight times more. In a femtosecond, light travels just 300 nanometers. The femtosecond laser shoots pulses at femtosecond intervals. And that lets us observe fast-moving phenomena in physics, chemistry and more as they happen. And out in the real world, the femtosecond laser has been used in things as varied as nuclear fusion to semiconductors to LASIK. It sounds impossible. In today's video, the femtosecond laser breakthrough.
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In March 1974, the French government unveiled the Messmer plan. It called for a massive nuclear energy construction spree to raise nuclear's share of electricity generation in France from 8% to over 70% by 1985. The relevant phrase was "all nuclear" (le tout-nucléaire). The results were undeniable. Amidst an oil crisis in 1973, France relied on imported oil for 67% of its total energy needs. And nuclear delivered. By 2000, nuclear supplied nearly 80% of France's electricity and nearly 40% of its total energy. In this video, one of the greatest runs of nuclear energy construction in world history.
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For decades, semiconductor fabs tolerated—and even expected—bad yields. Less than 50%, sometimes as low as 10%. Credible die yield data is rare, but here’s a market analysis from the late 1980s for the US Trade Representative during the US-Japan semiconductor dispute. It implies that when American and Japanese firms began 16K DRAM in 1978, yields were about 2%. Laughably low, but expected. And they stayed low. By 1984, US 16K DRAM yield hit 36%. Japan: 48%—better, still bad. Six years later! Now look at TSMC’s N5/N4 node, about 4–5 years old. Trade secrets, but N4 yields are around 80%. What’s going on? 6-micron process vs. 4-nanometer. The latter is far harder. Yet we’re hitting 80–90% yields. Is it a conspiracy? No—the fabs opened their third eyes. With new tools, they began inspecting and improving. In this video: how automated inspection tools revolutionized chip fabrication.
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While attending an ASML presentation at SEMICON Korea, I noticed a tidbit on one of the slides. A key part of their future EUV roadmap has been growing the power source to 800 watts or more. But it had not been super clear to me how they were going to do that, other than maybe raising the speed of the tin pellets. Then I saw the slide and it showed something new, at least to me. Three laser pulses rather than two. Now how about that? No, this is not an Onion article. This looks to be real. In this video, I want to talk about lasers and EUV light sources. And how three is better than two.
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Last year during my trip to Silicon Valley, I was invited to visit a company called PsiQuantum. When you think about quantum computing, your mind might conjure up those chandeliers. Qubits plunged to super cold temperatures. PsiQuantum is working on something a little different. Quantum computing using photons. In this video, a form of quantum compute with intriguing possibilities. Does it “work” like silicon does today? Is quantum compute really here? I can’t really answer those questions in this video. But we can explore the ideas and the ideas are certainly mind-bending.
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What was the world's top selling drug in 2023? Maybe the magic weight losing drug semaglutide, better known as Ozempic? Or the COVID vaccine perchance? Nope. 2023's top selling drug was an antibody, Keytruda, with about $25 billion in sales. $27 billion projected for 2024. In fact, five of the top ten best selling drugs in 2023 were antibodies. Antibody therapies revolutionized medicine. We have long known they can. The problem has always been how to make them the right way and at industrial scale. Today it is done with the help of a hamster. Or rather its cells. In this video, the incredible story of the hamster that revolutionized medicine. This is one of my favorite videos of the year.
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Vitamins are organic molecules that we need to survive. You do not need a lot of them, but if you go without them for too long then deficiencies result. And then you are going to be in for a bad time. Science helped us discover the magical life-saving properties of these vitamins. Engineering helped us scale and bring them everywhere. And cartels helped a few shadowy companies monopolize them for profit. This really happened. In this video, we look at vitamins and the secret, international cabal manipulating their prices for almost a decade.
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Carlos Slim wasn't the first ever Mexican to be the world's richest man. That honor should probably go to Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer, the half-Mexican who discovered and ran the greatest silver mine of all time: the Valenciana Mine. That mine, by itself, was responsible for 60% of all the silver produced in the 18th century. So Slim has some ways to go. But I have always been fascinated at Mexico's wealth inequality. How did a country with 46.8 million people living in poverty also end up hosting one of the world's richest men? The answer is that they sold him a monopoly. In this video, the birth, development, and eventual sale of Mexico’s telephone industry.
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I have been thinking about tariffs recently. No reason why, just interested. And while reading, I came across a series of interesting papers by economists Michael Clemens and Jeffrey Williamson. They explore what looks like an economic paradox. Up until World War I, the countries of Latin America were the most protectionist in the world, with some of its highest tariff rates. East Asia on the other hand - for reasons we will discuss later - had tariffs just a fraction as high. Yet during these decades, the Latin American countries grew faster than the Asian ones. Before World War I, one might argue that if you wanted faster economic growth, you needed high tariffs. Then things changed. In this video, high tariffs in Latin America. Low tariffs in Asia. One works the other doesn't, right? Time, context, and composition matter.
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When the semiconductor industry first started on EUV lithography, almost everyone believed that the optics would be the hardest things to do. Wavefront error—deviations of a light wave from its ideal—comes from imperfections in mirrors and lenses. A good lens aims for lambda/10 error; EUV optics must hit lambda/50. With EUV’s 13.5 nm wavelength, that’s 260 picometers. For context, a water molecule is 275 pm wide. That’s the total error budget—for the entire six-mirror system. Because errors add in quadrature, each mirror gets 106 pm rms. But mirrors double light deviation on reflection, so surface accuracy must be halved: 53 pm rms. That’s the radius of a hydrogen atom. It is 20 times harder for an EUV system with six mirrors to achieve the same wavefront performance of a DUV system with 60 surfaces. In this video, we go back to the machine you guys all know and love (again) and the finest multilayer mirrors ever made in history.
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Silicon's rapid rise in Radio Frequency or RF applications is a lesson in the power of Moore's Law. Over twenty years ago, all the parts of an RF front end module were made separately and integrated in a box. Silicon changed all that. And helped make possible today’s slick and thin cellphones. In this video, the unexpected rise and quizzical future of RF-CMOS.
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Social media is passing around an announcement that Huawei is testing a China-domestically developed EUV machine. This machine uses an EUV light source known as Laser-induced Discharge Plasma, or LDP. This is in contrast to ASML's method, which is called the Laser Produced Plasma or LPP method. It is claimed that LDP is much more efficient than LPP. Smaller, simpler and with better energy efficiency. Has ASML just been DeepSeek’d? I have been asked to speak on this via email and Twitter. I guess I have to do it. There is so little out there about how this machine works, so I am not going to speculate. But people have tried LDP before and we can talk about that. Feel free to extrapolate from there. In today's cope video, let’s take a look at the Laser-Induced Discharge Plasma EUV light source.
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Xiaomi roared onto global tech scene, raising the bar on what a Chinese smartphone should be. But when the phone market matured, the company executed a daring strategy shift. And then in March 2021, they announced they would make a freakin' EV. They did it. In this video, the rise of Xiaomi, its turnaround, its ride into EVs, and Apple.
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The Soviet Union once controlled what was perhaps the world's mightiest fishing fleet. A wolf pack of ships moving around the world, fishing the nations' oceans and emptying them of life. The second half of the 20th century saw the industrialization of the fishing industry. And the Soviets were right in the thick of that. In this video, we talk the once-mighty Soviet fishing fleet and the industrialization of fishing.
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Starting in the early 2000s, reports emerged of abnormal numbers of PC motherboards with leaking or even popping capacitors. A victim said in a newspaper interview that he turned on his computer one morning and suddenly heard a loud POP, like a distant firework. Other reports mention a weird, fishy smell in the air. The OS goes black and the computer fails to reboot. Most inexperienced people have no idea what to do except to bring it to a repair shop. Open it up, and inside you might find that a little cylinder on the board had swollen or even burst. This happened a lot. Why? In this video, we look at the infamous Capacitor Plague. We will never know what exactly happened, but let's try.
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Today's leading edge chips get hot. Like really hot. And nowadays much work is being done to try and keep them from getting TOO hot. Fancy things like dipping the whole chip into water or oil. But why do the chips get hot? And how does that heat spread? Simple question right? In this video, we explore heat at nanometer scale. Easier video ever.
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