Aren’t transistors physical things? How is it possible to manufacture billions, especially within the small size of a computer chip?
I saw the Apple m2 chip has 20 billion transistors – it just seems incomprehensible that that many can be manufactured.. they could be microscopic, but 20 billion is still an absurd number
In: 2283
Imagine an old-fashioned [slide projector](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkPRHYKjIdo). It has a light source, which shines through a slide, which then goes through a lens and projects a large image on the wall.
When manufacturing chips you do basically the exact same thing, but you use a lens which makes the image *smaller*. Then you add a light-sensitive coating on the material you are trying to make a chip out of. All the black parts in the slide will remain uncoated, but all the white parts in the slide are now protected by the coating. You now wash the chip with an acid which eats away all the material which is *not* protected by the coating. Rinse the entire thing, add a new layer of different chip material, and repeat.
So how do you make the slide? Well, you use a similar process to create a small slide from a very big one! In the very early days the initial slide was hand-cut and could be room-sized, but eventually they just started using fancy high-resolution printers for that.
Modern chip manufacturing is a bit different due to several decades of innovations, but the general concept is still reasonably accurate.
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