Can you beat them?
Chips and AI Quiz
Ten questions on the chips behind the AI boom, from the founding of Silicon Valley and Moore's law to TSMC, ASML's machines, US export controls and DeepSeek.
- 10 questions
- About 3 minutes
- Hard
- Includes 2 photos
About this quiz
The quiz runs from the young scientists who founded Silicon Valley in 1957, Gordon Moore's famous forecast and Intel's memory-chip war with Japan to Morris Chang's founding of TSMC and Nvidia's rise. It ends with the US-China contest: ASML's machines, export controls, Huawei's surprise phone, DeepSeek and the race to build fabs in Arizona.
It is rated hard, and it rewards readers who follow technology news. Knowing which company designs a chip, which one makes it and which one builds the machine that prints it will get you most of the way.
Topics in this quiz
Fairchild SemiconductorMoore's LawMorris ChangEUV Lithography
Read up first
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Blog
Why does Taiwan make the world's most advanced chips?
In 1985, Taiwan handed a sidelined American chip executive a blank check. Nearly every cutting-edge processor on Earth now comes from the company he built.
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Blog
Why does ASML have no real competitors?
Two Japanese giants once ran the chipmaking machine market. A small Dutch company beat both, and three decades later still has no real challenger.
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Encyclopedia
EUV Lithography
The near-impossible machine, built only by ASML, that prints the world's most advanced chips with 13.5-nanometer light, now a geopolitical chokepoint.
