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
They aren’t.
For instance, Intel does ‘binning’ on its processors. They have more than one chip now, but in the good old days the i3, i5 and i7 were all the exact same chip. The only difference was in performance testing – the chips that ended up binned as i3 failed to measure up but were within the tolerances of their i3 line, while the i7 are the best ones. Same with overclocking; chips which have the performance to be overclocked are unlocked, so the most near-perfect chips ended up as i7k, while the most flawed but still commercially acceptable chips ended up as locked i3s.
You’d have to get more specific with exact chips to know what they do with ones that are out of acceptable tolerances, though; some are destroyed or recycled as much as possible, rather than sold or shipped as lesser versions of the main chip line because their tolerances are very, very strict and specific.
Latest Answers