Very good channel to learn some basics of semiconductor device fabrication!

Focuses mostly on the semiconductor industry.

youtu.be/aL_kzMlqgt4?t=661 from Video "SMIC, Explained by Asianometry (2021)" from mentions he is of Chinese ascent, ancestors from Ningbo. Earlier in the same video he mentions he worked on some startups. He doesn't appear to speak perfect Mandarin Chinese anymore though based on pronounciation of Chinese names.

asianometry.substack.com/ gives an abbreviated name "Jon Y".

It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.

The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.

Register transfer level is the abstraction level at which computer chips are mostly designed.

The only two truly relevant RTL languages as of 2020 are: Verilog and VHDL. Everything else compiles to those, because that's all that EDA vendors support.

Much like a C compiler abstracts away the CPU assembly to:

Compilers for RTL languages such as Verilog and VHDL abstract away the details of the specific semiconductor technology used for those exact same reasons.

The compilers essentially compile the RTL languages into a standard cell library.

Examples of companies that work at this level include:

In the past, most computer designers would have their own fabs.

But once designs started getting very complicated, it started to make sense to separate concerns between designers and fabs.

What this means is that design companies would primarily write register transfer level, then use electronic design automation tools to get a final manufacturable chip, and then send that to the fab.

It is in this point of time that TSMC came along, and benefied and helped establish this trend.

The term "Fabless" could in theory refer to other areas of industry besides the semiconductor industry, but it is mostly used in that context.

It appears that Maxwell's equations can be derived directly from Coulomb's law + special relativity:This idea is suggested by the charged particle moving at the same speed of electrons thought experiment, which indicates that magnetism is just a consenquence of special relativity.

Examples under verilog, more details at Verilator.