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- Hacker News
- First time I’ve seen a lithography machine referred to as “a printer”. Is that really what they call it in fabs?by skrebbel
- It's meant for people that do not have extensive knowledge over how chips are made. I doubt majority of the people know what lithography means, let alone DUV EUV etc.by laurentiurad
- I hear the word "stepper" used sometimes talking about lithography machines. Makes sense I suppose that you'd need to precisely move the wafer around and expose small parts of it.by HPsquared
- I'll be honest, as someone who enjoys industrial food science, I felt a small pang of disappointment when I realized this was about integrated circuits.
- Yeah I mean, imagine that… an article about integrated circuits… on hacker news… completely unexpected.by kxjwidjwjdj
- haha sorry about that :Dby laurentiurad
- Same here, I scratched my head for couple of seconds after seeing that first step is "Sand" thinking "maybe it starts with planting potatoes" :Dby nazgu1
- Running a chip fab would actually make a pretty good Factorio-style automation game with perhaps puzzle elements inside the lithography device and in the tape out portionby nylonstrung
- I am on itby laurentiurad
- Captain of Industry has a simple chain that requires looping to add all layers, so there is that. Anything more complicated and it will look more like Zachtronics game.by Good4boothee
- Here's a video in case anyone else is also curious about what the crystal puller part looks like:by airstrike
- Did someone recently release a library (or skill.md [0]) for making these sorts of visualisations?
It looks strikingly like the LLM explainer someone posted a few days ago.
[0] I ask this bit in the "About" makes me wonder: "No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas."
by mattkrause - If it's TokenTown, then it's my project :) There's no skill file AFAIK, at least I didn't create one.by laurentiurad
- by taspeotis
- great video!by laurentiurad
- Nice website. One problem, though: the animation goes too fast for my reading speed, so I have to click stop. Then when I click on the next thing, I have to click stop again. Very annoying. If I click stop, just make it stay stopped until I click play again (which I won't).by dyingkneepad
- Same here. You can press space after going to the next building as a workaround.by ed_mercer
- Cute, but the steps don't make sense. E.g. each cycle shows both an ion gun and wire deposition. But only the first layer would use the ion gun, and only the following layers would have metal deposited. (Front End of Line vs Back End of Line). Not to mention the lack of diffusion and oxidation. The whole "loop" metaphor gives the wrong idea of what's happening.by kens
- I am taking notes about how to make chips in my garage.by inigyou
- Also "The pattern is photographed onto the wafer."... shudder.
All subtly wrong. And no, not in the 'simplified' sense.
by q3k - At the end the truckload of chips should be happily on its way to a consumer electronics factory when it gets suddenly diverted along with all the others down a side road that dumps all the chips into the ravenous insatiable maw of the hyperscale datacenter industry.by jameshart
- - added to my list of S-Tier resources on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183198by vivzkestrel
- Thanks a lot!by laurentiurad
- Does the S stand for slop?by kubb
- I think the chosen visualization detracts from learning rather than enhancing it. A simple, static flowchart would be more informative, easier to consume, and almost certainly less buggy and confusing to interact with.
- This is pretty good...simplifies the process and some of the items are out of order, but it describes the process pretty well.
Keep in mind, even 20 year old chips have 6-700 steps in their process...it's a giant loop of Etch, Photo, Implantation, Furnace, Chemical Vapor Deposition, Physical Vapor Deposition, Chemical Mechanical Planarization, etc...don't forget the measurement steps and defect scans. State of the art chips take 3-4 months to complete this process and it's well over a thousand steps.
by j_walter - Months?! Wow, I had no idea. So it's a very long pipeline.by HPsquared
- A miracle masterpiece in every device and we throw them out in 3 years.by kridsdale1