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 don’t. The error rate on microchips is fairly high, precisely because they’re so hard to manufacture. They are, by a pretty wide margin, the most complex mass manufactured devices devised by humanity.
Some chips fail outright. Some don’t work as well as others at speed, and that’s how we get different speed chips.
Nothing lays flat on the chip; they’re complex 3D structures when you zoom in. They are manufactured by insanely sophisticated equipment.
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