From building the software that designs semiconductors, to co-writing the book on who controls them, to working where technology, government & capital meet.

When the Chips Are Down

A book on the geopolitics of the semiconductor industry — why the hardest technology in the world to make is also the one everyone is fighting to control, and what that contest means for the countries trying to build their way into it.

I wrote it from inside the subject. I’d spent years building the tools that design chips before I ever wrote a word about the politics of them, so the book isn’t a survey from the outside — it’s the history, the economics, and the power struggle told by someone who knows how the thing is actually made.

Co-authored with Pranay Kotasthane in association with the Takshashila Institution, one of India’s leading think tanks.