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
At this level the work, transistors are not placed. The transistors are atoms thick and wide and engineered directly into the silicon wafers by doping the silicon in those locations to turn the silicon in that location into a transistor.
The process is refined, but thinking there are no imperfections is not correct. Many CPUs you buy are the exact same chip, it just failed it primary tests, so they ‘turn’ the chip down, maybe deactivate a core, cut out 1 level of cache and now it passes a lower test and gets sold as a lower chip. That i5 you buy, may not have been planned to be that specific i5.
They make it look like there are no imperfections, it not that. They are just real good at not wasting ‘bad’ chips by selling them as lower tier items.
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