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
It’s all about statistics. It is technically nearly impossible to make chip-wafers with imperfections. There is always a certain error rate spread all over the silicon wafer throughout the making. BUT if you make A LOT of wafers with a ton of i9 chips on it, there are some perfect ones on it.
These perfect ones are sold as i9, the slightly imperfect ones are downgraded (imperfections marked and programmed as unusable gates) sold as i7, the more imperfect ones as i5 and then there are lots of i9 that are so imperfect that they are downgraded to still make good i3 chips.
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