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
One of the methods used for making chips is called photo lithography. In a way, chip manufacturing borrows development practices from photography.
They cut very thin slices of silicone and use it as a semiconductor. Semi-conductor is a material that is semi-okay at conducting electricity. Some metals/materials are better than others at this job. Then they add layers ontop the entire waffer and use a special film that is sensitive to light and flash it to imprint the design. Then they will add another layer of metal and this covers the waffer completely. Then they use gas and a chemical bath to remove the excess metal and leave only traces where the design was imprinted.
Since the work surface is so tiny they add extra material then use fancy methods to remove what’s not needed.
Really basic comparison but say you drew a smiley face picture with a gluestick. Then dumped glitter all over it and flipped the paper over. You’d be left with the glitter that stuck to the glue creating your smiley face design.
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