How does a chip go from being an academic theory to a $10 billion R&D Project?
In: Technology
R&D is research and development. This covers a ton of things.
Some people plan how to give the product the features they want. Like, you want better raytracing capabilities on a GPU? What is actually needed for that? Someone needs to design the chip itself.
Sometimes this involves researching new engineering. We might not know how to do what we want already.
Some people research new techniques to manufacture these things. The chips we make today weren’t remotely possible to manufacture 20 years ago. New equipment and techniques are sometimes needed.
Some people work on taking all that research and scaling it up for production level scales. Like, how do you go from a handful of chips in a lab over several weeks to hundreds of thousands a year?
So it can look anything from relatively basic research in physics and engineering to large scale manufacturing concerns.
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