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
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Well of course they try to do it as perfectly as possible, but its unavoidable. This is why you see the big chip makers designing their chips a lot differently in modern times compared to how they used to.
It wasn’t that long ago really, where if you wanted to make the best, fastest chip, you just manufactured the biggest one you can. It’s called a “monolithic die” for that reason. If you take the heatsink off a high end GPU, you’ll find a giant piece of silicon. If you take one off a low end one, you’ll find a small one. Part of what makes a huge monolithic die expensive is if there’s a defect on it, they have to toss out (pulling a number out of my hat) 25% of a wafer for the one mistake. But if the wafer is all small chips, they might only be tossing out 5% of the wafer.
The new hotness is instead of making one monolithic die, you make smaller chips and connect them together, to make up for the fact they are individually worse than a big chip.
As for avoiding flaws to begin with, that’s more in their blackbox of trade secrets. There’s videos for like, 90s era chips on youtube that can explain some of it, but they were working on much larger process nodes.
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