I had this questions come into my head becasue I was watching a video of someone zooming into a microchip and they pass a human hair and continue zooming in an incredible amount. I’ve heard that some of the components in microchips are the size of DNA strands which is mind boggling. I also watched a video of the world’s smoothest object in which they stated that normal objects are no where near as smooth because if you blew them up in size the imperfections would be the size of Mount Everest. Like if you blew a baseball blew up to the size of earth it would have huge valleys and mountains. It wouldn’t be perfectly smooth across. So my question is how are these chip components the size of DNA not affected by these imperfections. Wouldn’t transistors not lay flat on the metal chip? How are they able to make the chips so smooth? No way it’s a machine press that flattens the metal out that smooth right? Or am I talking about two different points and we haven’t gotten that small yet?
In: Engineering
Let’s imagine the chip being made is a city.
The city works by getting cars from homes to offices. The homes and offices are connected by many different roads and highways.
The city is split up into many similar neighborhoods.
When there are problems with a road or neighborhood, those areas are turned off or destroyed. The city becomes less efficient.
The city does less work, and is slower.
Since many cities are made all at the same time to save on costs, each city is different in terms of efficiency.
Cities with 16 working neighborhoods are sold for more. While some cities only 1 of 16 work cost much less.
Each city still takes up the same amount of space.
Over time they are able to build more neighborhoods in the same amount of space.
They can have taller buildings, skinnier roads and houses.
To build the city very fast, there is a giant stencil/mold. Each stensil represents a feature like all walls on the first floor. After the stensil is placed, it rains concrete on the ground.
Sometimes you need to dig a trench or a valley in the city to put different material. Then they cover what you want to keep, then flood the city with some acid.
If you want a metal highways, they use a projector and blast the surface with metal until the metal gets stuck in the ground.
There are a lot of different methods. But it mainly involves a lot of layers of adding and subtracting materials.
Hopefully the above explanation gives a different take with less computer jargon.
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