ElI5 how microchips have millions of transistors without placing them individually
In: 5
They’re not separate parts that are placed. Consider it like text that’s carved into stone or printed on paper The letters aren’t separate things that are placed into the rock or paper. They’re formed by removing stone or adding ink. Similarly, the transistors are built into the silicon by printing on or carving into he material.
The entire process is extremely complicated, a relatively simplistic way of the process is for EUV (Extremely Ultra Violent) Lithography is you take particals for pure tin and you vaporizer it which produces UV light that’s in the ballpark of 5nm
You then take that UV light and reflect it on a wafer, but you need to be extremely accurate. The mirrors are about $100k each and requires about 20 and need to be extremely flat, i.e if the mirror was the size of the US the tallest bump would be about 5mm tall
A wafer is a thin slice of silica that then the light then carves out
If you want a more detailed video[ this one](https://youtu.be/RwW0Yfy0oCw) does a good job at it
They’re not separate parts that are placed. Consider it like text that’s carved into stone or printed on paper The letters aren’t separate things that are placed into the rock or paper. They’re formed by removing stone or adding ink. Similarly, the transistors are built into the silicon by printing on or carving into he material.
They’re not separate parts that are placed. Consider it like text that’s carved into stone or printed on paper The letters aren’t separate things that are placed into the rock or paper. They’re formed by removing stone or adding ink. Similarly, the transistors are built into the silicon by printing on or carving into he material.
Early in the development of computer chips they would have been designed by hand, actually drawing the location of individual components. However fairly quickly it became possible to design chips with the help of computers, and eventually *necessary* to do so. Modern CPUs can have 26 billion transistors and there is no way humans are manually deciding on their location and integration with the rest of the chip.
Instead specialized computer programs are used to design new chips to a particular specification. The particulars of these software packages are trade secrets as obviously Intel wouldn’t want just anyone being able to design new chips exactly as they can.
Have you seen those videos where a painting is made by spraying paint through various stencils? They put one stencil, spray one color then put another stencil and spray a different color and so on until a painting emerges?
Chip making is similar. They start with a silicon disk and then add or remove material using stencils to create transistors and connections between them in place.
Early in the development of computer chips they would have been designed by hand, actually drawing the location of individual components. However fairly quickly it became possible to design chips with the help of computers, and eventually *necessary* to do so. Modern CPUs can have 26 billion transistors and there is no way humans are manually deciding on their location and integration with the rest of the chip.
Instead specialized computer programs are used to design new chips to a particular specification. The particulars of these software packages are trade secrets as obviously Intel wouldn’t want just anyone being able to design new chips exactly as they can.
Have you seen those videos where a painting is made by spraying paint through various stencils? They put one stencil, spray one color then put another stencil and spray a different color and so on until a painting emerges?
Chip making is similar. They start with a silicon disk and then add or remove material using stencils to create transistors and connections between them in place.
Early in the development of computer chips they would have been designed by hand, actually drawing the location of individual components. However fairly quickly it became possible to design chips with the help of computers, and eventually *necessary* to do so. Modern CPUs can have 26 billion transistors and there is no way humans are manually deciding on their location and integration with the rest of the chip.
Instead specialized computer programs are used to design new chips to a particular specification. The particulars of these software packages are trade secrets as obviously Intel wouldn’t want just anyone being able to design new chips exactly as they can.
The entire process is extremely complicated, a relatively simplistic way of the process is for EUV (Extremely Ultra Violent) Lithography is you take particals for pure tin and you vaporizer it which produces UV light that’s in the ballpark of 5nm
You then take that UV light and reflect it on a wafer, but you need to be extremely accurate. The mirrors are about $100k each and requires about 20 and need to be extremely flat, i.e if the mirror was the size of the US the tallest bump would be about 5mm tall
A wafer is a thin slice of silica that then the light then carves out
If you want a more detailed video[ this one](https://youtu.be/RwW0Yfy0oCw) does a good job at it
Latest Answers