I just don’t understand how putting elements, rocks, minerals or whatever computer parts are made of together can make something as complex as a computer.
How did we go from sticks and stones to having access to anything you want to know infront of you by pressing a couple buttons?
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If you want a video explaining how chips are made [here’s a link](https://youtu.be/RwW0Yfy0oCw?si=lwDR9pyQahX8pCpW)
The starting steps of chip production is refining silica, you then use that to grow into a crystal that’s then thinly sliced into a disc called a [wafer](https://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article/New-semiconductor-wafer-manufacturing-research-16409152.php)
You then take those wafers and use UV or EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Light to carve into those wafers somewhere in the range of ~5 Nanometers for the light, part of this process is also called doping, which is infusing another element into the wafer, this is used to help control how electricity would flow while inside the wafer
When dealing with something like this, you need to be *extremely* precise, like that video explains, there’s a reason that only one company is able to produce the equipment to even do this, you can need a way to reflect the EUV light so they need custom mirrors in the ballpark of $120k for each mirror and requires dozens
Part of this carving is called lithograph, and the reason is to print transistors into the wafer
That’s the essence of what makes computers work and why they have so many transistors in them. Low voltage is then read as a 0 while higher voltage is read as a 1, these signals then use logic gates to get other outputs
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