How difficult is it to create silicon chips and why?
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How difficult: it is beyond-your-imagination difficult. The technology (chip) that makes your cell phone just work is pretty much straight-up magic. Why: There are 50 billion transistors in the latest CPU chips with the smallest features being 5 nm (1/20000 the width of a hair). Each 12 inch silicon wafer with hundreds of CPUs is subject to about 1000 steps of patterned optical exposure, etching, deposition, heating etc. To keep costs down, each step is done blazingly fast so that millions of such wafers are produced annually. Almost all of the trillion or so transistors on each wafer, each of which took 1000 steps to make, work. The factories (called “fabs”) to produce such chips costs 10’s of billions of dollars, meaning only a few ultra-large companies can be in this business. This is one of the reasons the US just chose to subsidize the industry.
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