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
The tolerances for manufacturing are essentially “perfection”. Yes everything is held perfectly level. Yes the wafers are polished to absolute flatness. All of the machines are mounted to resist any sort of external vibration. You don’t dare bring anything containing copper or that touched copper anywhere near the non-copper areas of the factory. It isn’t something that someone woke up one day and said “let’s make a billion transistors for one chip”. It was all iterative and learning how to do things better, and better technology created tighter tolerances and more complex and larger designs.
And there’s still defects but there’s also redundancy built into the design so you don’t have to throw the whole thing away just because a handful of transistors caught a defect.
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