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
How they are made is wild. There are videos on it. But it works similarly to how old 35mm film is developed on paper with enlargers in dark rooms. But the opposite. In a nutshell the cpu is built using layers of chemicals that change composition when hit with powerful UV light. A large version of the cpu is printed as a filter in front of this light and then uses lenses that focused much smaller on the surface of the cpu. Then another chemical layer is applied that is slightly different and uses a different filter and the process repeats. The results are super tiny transistors laid out how they need to be. And as others said, failed chips are thrown out, poor performing but working chips are sold for cheap, and the more perfect chips are priced much higher.
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