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
Those structure sizes you read (nanometers) used to represent the actual dimensions on the chip. At one point like 10 years or so ago, it became impossible to shrink much further, so they improved the structures. Marketing still labeled it to be smaller to represent the gain in computing power per chip.
How it’s done is called optical lithography, and although I did that and could tell you many things about it, better watch some explanations on YouTube first. It’s a bit beyond a eli5.
Note that there still are quite a number of imperfections. Which is why they manufacture all CPU/GPU chips to the highest spec they offer, and those chips who can’t deliver simply become the lower tier models.
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