Like… I can’t even imagine something this small. How can you produce a transistor smaller than 10nm, especially billions of them all working flawlessly?
I understand that CPUs have cores disabled due to manufacturing defects but… even so we’re talking about what feels like a mind-boggling level of precision.
How is it done?
In: Engineering
The smallest features are the gate of the transistor, the most critical part. Open the gate, the electrons can go through. The gate can be very small in one direction and long in the other direction. So instead of a swing gate, it is more like a garage door with the voltage raising or lowering the door to let the electrons through.
The surrounding parts of the transistor are quite a bit larger to allow connections to be made and make sure the voltage is applied uniformly.
Very short wavelengths of light help define the very small dimensions, (sometimes electrons instead of light) and basically a lot of different engineering tricks have to be played to have the necessary precision to add energy to only the very small regions you want to change. Once you have changed that region, you can either remove that small region, or sometimes you want to leave that region and remove the parts you didn’t change. If the regions you are changing are connecting molecules or atoms in ways they won’t be removed by the next chemistry step, since atoms and molecules can be small the regions left behind can be small.
Other tricks including having ways were only one layer of atoms can be deposited at a time. Atomic layer deposition.
What is also neat is how all the transistors have to be connected together in the right ways with little strips of metal, and how you keep all the little metal lines from touching each other with insulating materials called dielectrics. It you dissolve the dielectrics and look at it under a scanning electron microscope it looks like a three dimensional maze.
Other things to think about is how you have to go from very tiny wires to bigger wires until you leave the chip to connect to the much larger world we live in.
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