How difficult is it to create silicon chips and why?
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Everything involved is extremely specialized technology.
The silicon itself needs to be melted and pulled out as a single crystal that is then sliced into thin wafers. Just making this crystal is difficult and not done by many companies.
Then once you have the slice of crystal, the “wafer” you need to put circuits oh it. You use photolithography machines to do this, and they’re very precise machines that cost a lot of money.
Once you have the machine, you’re contending against all sorts of physical effects, like the light, which you’re using to draw the circuit; waving too much to create a straight line.
Then just the economics. Everything here is expensive, setting up new factories(chip fabs) is expensive. Like the GDP of a small nation levels of expensive.
So it’s really tricky, and really expensive, and that makes it hard to do
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