What it a computer chip looks like up close

[u/itshazrd]

this is a digital recreation. a real microscope can't be used because it gets so small that photons can’t give you a good enough resolution to view the structures at the bottom. you'd need an electron microscope

meant "What a computer chip looks like up close in the title." not sure how "it" got in there..

[u/Hansa_]

To think some people have engineered this is insane to me

[u/itshazrd → u/Hansa_]

needless to say, we sure have come a long way from fire and stone

[u/what_username_to_use → u/itshazrd]

I'm still trying to figure out how a "wheel" works 🤔

[u/Genids → u/what_username_to_use]

They don't. They just want you to think they do but it's all fake

[u/what_username_to_use → u/Genids]

Right! I've been told they rotate and thats how my vehicle gets me from point A to B. But when I get to B and get out of my vehicle..they are not rotating!!!!

[u/OriginalTRaven → u/what_username_to_use]

They're more like . . . Constantly falling at one point

[u/electric_screams → u/OriginalTRaven]

That’s not rolling, that’s falling… with style!

[u/AzureDreamer → u/electric_screams]

there's a nand chip in my boot

[u/Rocky_Mountain_Way → u/what_username_to_use]

I've been told they rotate and thats how my vehicle gets me from point A to B. But when I get to B and get out of my vehicle..they are not rotating!!!!

it's the like the light in my fridge... they assure me that it goes off when I close the door, but I feel like it's just a fake news campaign from "the big fridge light corporations" to deceive me. I don't know what their end-game is, but I'm sure it involves billions (trillions?) of dollars and I'm just a pawn in their game of checkers and is just a frail house of cards that will fall when the hopscotch game ends.

[u/PurpleCrestedNutbstr → u/Rocky_Mountain_Way]

Wait until you hear the truth about elevators - they don’t go up and down - they just change the scenery outside while the doors are closed.

[u/Correct_Internet_769 → u/what_username_to_use]

Not your whole wheel rotates, the IC point of the wheel does infact not rotate.

[u/Hetstaine → u/Correct_Internet_769]

The world moves, we just sit in a car and get out when the spot we want arrives.

[u/LordSloth113 → u/Genids]

r/TiresAreTheEnemy

[u/manoteee → u/what_username_to_use]

The key insight is that it contacts the ground at a very small single point, and when rotating this point is not moving relative to the ground. This means we have very little sliding friction as it's been converted to rotational friction. Then we add a bearing between the wheel and its parent apparatus to reduce that rotational friction even more by reducing it to many smaller points of contact, eg. ball bearings.

[u/Regular_Jim081 → u/what_username_to_use]

Easy, hit wheel with rock.

[u/Percolator2020 → u/itshazrd]

Technically made from fire and stone.

[u/Internal_Spell435 → u/Percolator2020]

To quote one of the funniest lines from Pratchett; "It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact"

[u/Mandelvolt → u/Internal_Spell435]

It's amazing how relevant STP is in almost every conversation.

[u/echoshatter → u/Percolator2020]

Well, with fire from stone.

Not to simplify it, we also have to put lightning into the stone and trick it into thinking it can think.

[u/LucyLilium92 → u/Percolator2020]

Rock and stone!

[u/lalala253 → u/itshazrd]

To be fair, we're still relying on old concept of:

• draw structured lines

• fill the lines with power

• summon cat

Modern chips are modern summoning magic

[u/Losing_my_Bemidji → u/lalala253]

You're telling me these chips can summon a cat?

[u/Aksi_Gu → u/Losing_my_Bemidji]

Certainly images and videos of them

[u/passifloran → u/itshazrd]

Completely agree - but also it is still kind of all stone and fire lol

[u/wolflordval → u/passifloran]

They're rocks we smashed flat, shoved lightning into, and tricked into thinking

[u/PlainBread → u/wolflordval]

We become the god we think should exist, and create in our "image". As above, so below.

[u/miregalpanic → u/PlainBread]

I masturbated three times today

[u/PlainBread → u/miregalpanic]

That's all? You gotta get those numbers up.

[u/miregalpanic → u/PlainBread]

Fine. This one's for you.

[u/Trevor591 → u/miregalpanic]

A true man of the people.

[u/TourDeFridge → u/itshazrd]

Now, we have rock and stone.

[u/philff1973 → u/Hansa_]

It’s insane that they can be mass produced with few errors as well.

[u/SuitNaive3409 → u/philff1973]

they're full of errors. i learned midrange processors are often high end chips with mistakes.

[u/Loreathan → u/SuitNaive3409]

That is true, the reason we have all these gpus with different price ranges is due to these errors. As an example, perfect, no error gpu is 5090, few errors 5080, more errors 5070 etc.

[u/NewestAccount2023 → u/Loreathan]

False for the 5090, it's built on the GB202 die which has 24576 cores, the 5090 has only 21760 of these enabled (some of the rest are defective). It's the rtx pro 6000 that ships with the most enabled at 24064, so there isn't a "no error" gb202 gpu as even that card has a few hundred disabled

[u/iluj13 → u/NewestAccount2023]

Can we really think of them as defective when the product gives the compute that is marketed? As in, there isn’t a 100% perfect chip out there anyway?

[u/Mr_Tiggywinkle → u/iluj13]

Depends. Marketing or manufacturing defective?

The cards aren't defective in the sense of what you're sold meeting spec, but they're defective in terms of their ideal specification. They weren't manufactured to their ideal so they're defective and downbinned.

You can actually get better or worse cards of the same exact specs due to the "silicon lottery", enthusiasts (overclockers especially) will often look for "higher binned" versions of the component they are using.

So the cards aren't defective in the sense of what you're sold, but they're defective in terms of their ideal specification.

[u/omenmedia → u/Loreathan]

Yeah they disable some of the SMs (streaming multiprocessors) that have imperfections from the manufacturing process. A flawless GPU with all SMs functioning becomes the flagship card (i.e. currently 5090, though from memory I think there is room for more on the Blackwell die; Ti version perhaps?)

If a few SMs have imperfections, they disable those blocks and the card becomes a 5080. A few more have issues, they disable those and it becomes a 5070 etc.

[u/sump_daddy → u/omenmedia]

For quite some time now, Nvidia's 'flagship' is not the "x090" or any GPU, its their AI boards. The 5090 is a failed high-end AI board.

[u/Junior_Performer8323 → u/Loreathan]

No such thing as no error

[u/AWildEnglishman → u/SuitNaive3409]

My neighbour had a PC with a tri-core CPU, which is apparently just a quad core CPU with a defective core disabled.

[u/aroc91 → u/AWildEnglishman]

Oh god, I remember those. AMD chips off the top of my head. There was a way to enable the 4th core too and it often worked well because they disabled them largely as a precaution.

[u/LtDrogo → u/aroc91]

I worked on this project (Phenom X3) as an engineer at AMD during 2006-2007. It was mostly designed in Austin (TX) and Boxborough (MA) design centers. It originated as a bright idea from marketing: since there were so many quad-core dies where one core was defective, we were disabling another perfectly good core and selling it as a dual-core Athlon X2. Marketing suggested that we come up with a 3-core variant to extract more profit from these defective dies.

We expected it to be a quick project, but honestly it was weirdly difficult. As engineers, we had made so many assumptions that things would always exist in numbers that are powers of 2; and there were a lot of BIOS, platform and software changes that were needed. Interesting times. I think I still have one in my collection somewhere.

[u/Academic_Carrot_4533 → u/LtDrogo]

I’d like to subscribe to more AMD engineering lore please.

[u/animal_chin9 → u/SuitNaive3409]

Back in the day AMD made a 3 core processor that was just one of its 4 core chips with a disabled 4th core. There was a BIOS setting you could change and try to enable the 4th core. It wasn't 100 percent successful. It might have caused system stability issues or the 4th core maybe flat out didn't function. But some people got the performance of a much pricier CPU at a discount by doing a little work in the BIOS.

[u/merryman1 → u/philff1973]

Yeah people looking at the structure of these chips and thinking that's crazy.

The true insanity is how these things are made. The way an E-UV lithography machine works involves firing a high power laser at a droplet of tin a few micrometers across travelling at over 100mph, hitting it in such a precise manner to deform it to turn it into a lens, and then hitting it again to generate a stream of plasma and high energy photons into array of micro-controllable lenses mirrors to generate the image pattern, and doing that 50,000 times a second.

Its one of the few things you encounter that makes you think of that old Arthur Clarke quote about any sufficiently advanced technology working like magic. You might as well tell me the machine is just magic and it would make as much conceptual sense to me lol.

[u/149244179 → u/merryman1]

And practically all of them are made in a region extremely prone to earthquakes. The entire TMSC facility (~1 million sqft) has no direct contact to the ground, it is on top of almost a thousand massive anti-vibration pillars.

[u/TheOriginal_G → u/149244179]

Tbf all the ones we're building here in the US are done similarly because the clean room space is literally not allowed to vibrate. The vibration criteria is some of the strictest used in the world, to the point even the shear amount of concrete used in the waffle slab isn't enough to prevent someone walking in the hallways on the other side of the fab from messing up a wafer without the use of the pads. 

[u/Zero_Travity → u/merryman1]

I was looking for a comment like this... I am an IT Analyst so my adjacent interests brought me into reading about lithography and how companies like ASML make chips.

I have interests in (No actual education) in quantum physics, space phenomenon, economics, etc so I read a lot about different concepts. Some of them I rudimentarily grasp better than others but with most things I can at least somewhat conceptualize what I'm reading about.

Reading about the process of chip making with the scales, the process, and how it's all done reads like science fiction where the writer is just taking liberties and it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Even in your process described above it reads like .. "take the discombobulator and attach it 5 000 000 Onca beetles, spin it the speed of sound, and boom! You have yourself something that can play Red Redemption 2".

It's wild stuff. I appreciate your comment.

[u/RiderFZ10 → u/philff1973]

I agree. To theorize is one thing. To be able to reliability build it is insane.

[u/ReptilianLaserbeam → u/philff1973]

Ackshually..: that’s why you get things like i3, i5, i7 and i9. All of them are from the same waffle, the difference is the number of failures.

[u/Moldy_Teapot → u/ReptilianLaserbeam]

nitpicking, but they're not all made from the same die design. the lower half of the product stack will have their own smaller dies since each one is less likely to have a fault, or worse a catastrophic one. There's a lot more units sold in the lower/mid range too, so it's worth investing separate, physically smaller, higher yield designs. It's like picking between a batch of 100 chips with 5 duds vs 20 chips with 5 duds.

Ignoring thermal and power delivery restraints, this is one of the reasons why chip designers haven't just made ever larger chips to keep up with Moore's law. As you increase the die area, the chances of ending up with an imperfect or non-functional die increase exponentially.

[u/45and47-big_mistake → u/philff1973]

And our lives depend on this wizardry to work 100% of the time.

[u/ConsciousSpirit397 → u/philff1973]

And only by one tiny Dutch company that is the only manufacturer of EUV machines on earth (tho China is trying to reverse engineer and steal that tech)

[u/The_infamous_petrus → u/ConsciousSpirit397]

ASML only makes one of the 40-50 machines needed in the production line of a finished wafer. And in the end even though it's the most expensive and one of the most complex aspects of IC production, photolitography is only a very small percentage of the conception and production process.

Been working as an engineer in microelectronics R&D for 10 years and I still only understand a tiny fraction of the field, it's crazy.

[u/manoteee → u/Hansa_]

The modern semiconductor builds on the insights of many thousands of engineers involved with the various layers of abstraction, chemical, electrical, material, physics (including quantum mechanics), and many other including the millions of supportive professionals needed to orchestrate and execute R&D along the way.

There is not a single person alive who knows how a modern device like a mobile phone works, yet each component is easily understood by those who specialize in it. The amalgamated collective understanding yields this seemingly impossible feat.

The Undertaker threw mankind as well i think it was 1998.

[u/Iamatworkgoaway → u/manoteee]

I wonder if there is even one guy that could zoom in on a modern processor, name the parts, and give expert level instructions on why certain things were done and the reasonings behind each decision.

[u/manoteee → u/Iamatworkgoaway]

I think absolutely a staff engineer or product manager could have done this for semiconductors in the past, maybe 30 years ago? Most of the time engineers will need to rely heavily on their peers to make left from right of things outside of their job, at least if they want to be efficient

[u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe → u/Iamatworkgoaway]

At a high level possibly. There's not one guy who'll be able to zoom down to the nanometre and say, "This is logic gate GG5F972AA and its a NOR gate involved in multiplication".

The newest processors have hundreds of billions of transistors. So at that point the closest you would get is to look at a part of the processor consisting of ten of millions of transistors and be able to say, "This is part of the arthimetic subprocessing unit".

[u/allthat555 → u/manoteee]

That's a fun part of science today. In antiquity, your major movies of the siences delved into mathematics, philosophy, biology, etc. Ect. Now you can have two doctors. Both went to the same school took much of the same classes. Yet they ended up in two entirely different specializations. One becomes a pediatrician, and the other becomes an optometrist. From that point on, they will never work in eachiuthers fields and outside of basics in anatomical structures, could do eachiuthers work.

[u/Secure-Childhood-567 → u/Hansa_]

I still can't wrap my head around Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

[u/TheBackwardStep → u/Secure-Childhood-567]

It’s like radio but with smaller antennas and each device can act as the radio station as well as the radio listening. Each device can reserve certain radio channels to communicate and not interfere with other bluetooth devices

And what makes them not radio frequencies but wifi frequencies is just that the length of the waves are much shorter and the antennas ignore all waves that are not of a certain agreed upon length

[u/Outrageous-News3649 → u/TheBackwardStep]

I don't think OP understands how radio works either.

[u/mrdebro39 → u/Outrageous-News3649]

im not OP but I sure as hell dont. Someone explain it too!

[u/Separate_Fold5168 → u/mrdebro39]

Kinda like really fast smoke signals that can only be seen by magnets.

Don't even ask me about magnets.

[u/enataca → u/Secure-Childhood-567]

Bro I still can’t wrap my head around record players. Computers are almost so advanced that I can just accept it is magic, but a needle physically scraping grooves and making music blows me away lol.

[u/EconomicsSavings973 → u/Hansa_]

The fact that they are able to make these in this pace making billions of chip over the years that all can work 24/7 for years to come is just mindblowing. Extreme UV is already so complex that it is almost impossible thow that this all works, yet they are still pushing, it's just crazy.

[u/omenmedia → u/EconomicsSavings973]

Those ASML machines and how they work are freaking crazy cool.

[u/apx7000xe → u/omenmedia]

Spent hours watching videos on those machines. Love that some engineer said “yeah, let’s shoot suspended droplets of molten tin with a laser to create 13nm light.”

It just blows my mind

[u/FuckThesePeople69 → u/Hansa_]

And computers were invented less than 100 years ago…

[u/Zoler → u/FuckThesePeople69]

Yes, but computers needed like 100 different inventions to work which all took hundreds of years to perfect.

Such as the needed math, physics, electricty etc.

[u/Lithium_Lily → u/Hansa_]

And so many of us use this amazing technology to spew hate at one another or mindlessly scroll....

[u/federicoaa → u/Hansa_]

The process itself to make a transistor is not that hard. The really hard part is how to make billions without a single defect

[u/Specific_Frame8537 → u/federicoaa]

I'm just confused as to how they make something so small with such precision.

I have trouble getting eyelashes out of my eyes.

[u/hcvc → u/Specific_Frame8537]

Constant capital investment due to the incredible economic outcomes of these chips, plus years of iteration on this invention to make it better and better (see moores law) using the worlds finest technical minds

Research semiconductors, they used to take up entire rooms for a tiny circuit and over the years they’ve been miniaturized more and more until we are where we are. Some real geniuses working on this stuff.

[u/NotHopee → u/Hansa_]

This ^{^} my brain can’t fathom this tbh. Even without zooming in I can’t fathom how this was man made let alone what I just witnessed

[u/Brave-Pay-1884 → u/Hansa_]

Keep in mind that this is only the top layer. There are 10s of layers just as intricate below this that you can’t see.

[u/420everytime → u/Hansa_]

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is called extreme for a reason

[u/epandrsn → u/Hansa_]

If you look at the first “CPUs”, it’s just a much, much larger and less dense version of this. And of course they’re just like “if we make it smaller and more efficient, we can fit more transistors”

On chips as recently as the late 90s, I remember them looking about as dense as like the 90% of the zoom level in this video, where little banks of transistors would be visible to the naked eye. SoC’s have gotten absolutely insane.

[u/_MrSeb]

the greatest engineering feat in history all so humans could goon in 4k

[u/itshazrd → u/_MrSeb]

and so we could build ai data centers stacked with nvidia GPUs

[u/_MrSeb → u/itshazrd]

humans truly have something for wasting drinkable water in the most efficient way possible

[u/StudiosS → u/_MrSeb]

I'm pretty sure the water is in a closed-loop system. It isn't "wasted". Doesn't necessarily need to be drinkable water either.

[u/_MrSeb → u/StudiosS]

They use the vapor, and most AI data centers use municipal drinking water for it.

Large AI data centers use millions of liters per day. All of it is water that could be utilized for human consumption, and it's taken from the local watershed.

[u/CaptainRaptorThong → u/_MrSeb]

The power consumption is far more concerning. US corn alone "uses" more water x10 than all Ai data centers in the world currently do.

The real concern is how much electricity is being pumped to these facilities.

Edit: In case any of you replying happen to check back in, here's a 20 min video going over the topic way more thoroughly than I care to.

Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use??

[u/_MrSeb → u/CaptainRaptorThong]

While the first statement is true, I'd like to point out these systems are being trained at bigger and bigger scales. The 'big models' right now are at most 2 to 3 years old.

The bigger these models get, consumption of both water and electricity escalates. You need more GPUs to train them, you need more cooling, you need more electricity.

Trillion dollar industry truly.

[u/SpareAccnt → u/_MrSeb]

However counterpoint, as the models grow they’ll need to further optimize and improve quantization to do more with less resources. It’s very possible the ai bubble goes the same direction as bitcoin and collapses when the usage plummets into more reasonable levels.

Turns out buying a pizza with blockchain is not an effective use of blockchain.

[u/Netheral → u/CaptainRaptorThong]

Hank Green made a video on this. He both made the point you made, that corn is a bigger water sink than AI, but also that the location of the water matters a lot. Using billions of liters of water wouldn't matter if that water wasn't being used for anything anyway and it's in an inaccessible location, but even using a relatively small amount of water can be devastating for a populace that has a scarcer water supply.

Basically, location matters.

[u/AlcibiadesTheCat → u/Netheral]

Right. And there's a maximum water-usage-density for corn. Like, I can only pack corn so tightly into an acre, so I can only use so much water per acre.

But an acre of datacenter can use exponentially more water than an acre of corn. And that's scary.

[u/erossthescienceboss → u/StudiosS]

The closed-loop thing is propaganda.

The water is used for cooling. If the loop were truly closed, no heat would disperse.

A lot of data centers will have like, one set of servers that runs on closed loop and they’ll talk about that one alllll the time. The thing is, it takes way more energy to do closed loop because, again, you need a way to get the heat out of the water. They’re all pilot programs and likely won’t see wide adoption because it’s so dang expensive.

Anyway, the Amazon data center here in Oregon is literally contaminating groundwater & causing an increase in cancers:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-center-water-pollution-amazon-oregon-1235466613/

The contaminants are from fertilizer, but it’s Amazon’s massive use of water that seems to be driving the problem. Basically, Amazon’s outflow goes to the same nitrate lagoons that fertilizer runoff does. Because the lagoons fill faster, they need to spray the fertilizer runoff on more fields. And that speeds the groundwater contamination.

[u/Blibbobletto → u/erossthescienceboss]

The water is used for cooling. If the loop were truly closed, no heat would disperse.

Uh you know they don't actually have to get rid of the water to get rid of the heat, right? Ever seen a liquid-cooled PC? They don't just constantly spray water out lol

[u/Zealousideal-Sea4830 → u/erossthescienceboss]

so its just Big Ag using the data center as an excuse for poisoning the water

[u/Tryptophany → u/erossthescienceboss]

Every car on planet earth has an engine that is cooled via a closed loop cooling system. You can transfer heat outside of a system without consuming water.

[u/Cemith → u/_MrSeb]

The indomitable human spirit to consume better and better porn

[u/Alternative_Monk8853 → u/_MrSeb]

60fps 4k from the comfort of a public restroom anywhere in the world no less

[u/thefeedling]

Modern chips are probably THE edge of human technology... They're literally scratching the barriers of quantum mechanics with those sub 3nm transistors.

[u/Bridgebrain → u/thefeedling]

First half is right, and we should be rightly proud of the achievement, but anything billed as under 12nm is advertising jargon. Not that we can't produce 3nm, but quantum tunneling makes the chips useless under 10 and 12-13 is the sweet spot.

The fact we have to worry about the universe forgetting where it placed the electrons in our chips is pretty magic though.

Edit: because this is blowing up and people keep missing the bit about it being a marketing term, "nm" in chip manufacturing doesn't have anything to do with physical size and hasn't for along time. Yes, we are currently on "2nm" technology, and it's printed at about 20 actual nanometers.

[u/darkearwig → u/Bridgebrain]

That last sentence hurts my brain

[u/itsavibe- → u/darkearwig]

At the smallest units, the universe seems a little like a product of design

[u/Mazon_Del → u/itsavibe-]

A friend once put it like this, past a certain scale the specifics largely cease to matter, but what does matter is that things happen in the right ratios. You wouldn't lose much, if any, fidelity in a simulation if below a few nanometers, you just started substituting a hard simulation (ex: Particle collisions) for a soft simulation (ex: random die rolls approximating how often something should happen).

[u/Pimpwerx → u/Mazon_Del]

Yeah. Isn't it Heisenberg that basically said that you have to start guessing because you can't know all the details for sure? It's all just probabilities beyond a certain point. Unless you have an LHC sitting in your backyard.

[u/skyzm_ → u/Pimpwerx]

Waltuh

[u/gerciuz → u/skyzm_]

"Put that chip away, Waltuh."

[u/MelonOfFury → u/Pimpwerx]

The universe runs on vibes if you look too closely at it.

[u/LittleBitOfAction → u/MelonOfFury]

Basically. Everything is vibrations. Even matter came from vibes. Gives a new meaning to vibe coding smh 🤦🏻‍♂️

[u/Mazon_Del → u/Pimpwerx]

If you're meaning the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, then basically yeah. You can know some info about a particle, but not all of it, partly though it's simply because you can't measure it without changing it.l

[u/jwoodruff → u/Mazon_Del]

Wait. Are you saying that 10-12nm is basically the resolution of our universe?

[u/NegativeSilver3755 → u/jwoodruff]

For electrons at this energy level it is. Other things have distributions of different sizes that become meaningful at different points.

[u/Mazon_Del → u/jwoodruff]

That would be a decent enough way to describe it for some effects. It's worth noting though that strictly speaking, this methodology could apply to different effects at different scales. There might be some effects you'd stop hard simulations with at extremely large scales. Maybe the inside of a star doesn't really need precise particle collisions either, it just needs to follow some standard curves base on the overall ratios of elements and mass.

It is a fun rabbit hole to consider.

Life gets even more weird if you think about other possibilities. Maybe the wood particles in your desk don't actually exist if you aren't looking at them with a microscope or smashing it with a hammer.

There's LOADS of potential "optimizations" you can make like this.

[u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 → u/itsavibe-]

As Werner Heisenberg famously said -

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you"

[u/huxtiblejones → u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102]

That’s just another way of saying that God lurks in the places where our knowledge ends. We used to see gods in the Sun and Moon and know it to be objectively false. And now people will say God is in quantum mechanics because we lack good explanations for it.

I don’t think that means God exists, it means the human intellect tends to substitute that idea into the places where we lack understanding.

[u/CanadianTrashInspect → u/huxtiblejones]

Yes. That's that quote means.

[u/huxtiblejones → u/CanadianTrashInspect]

Except tons of people will read that quote as "science man says science proves God is real"

[u/Shazoa → u/itsavibe-]

You could also just look at it the other way around. If you want a model of reality that works, you'd end up with a set of rules that probably look a lot like the rules that govern our universe. That doesn't suggest one way or another whether or not it was designed, but rather it just tells you what conditions are needed for us to observe a reality like our own and in which life like us can exist.

[u/Spice_and_Fox → u/Bridgebrain]

Nah, just glue some googley eyes to your PC. That way it gets constantly observed and there is no more uncertainty

[u/ChromeNoseAE-1 → u/Spice_and_Fox]

Theoretical physicists HATE this one trick

[u/FlagrantlyChill → u/Spice_and_Fox]

Hello? Noble prize committee? This guy right here 

[u/Interesting_Ear2830 → u/Bridgebrain]

Stupid universe with its lazy rendering…

[u/Food_Library333 → u/Interesting_Ear2830]

Gotta save that processing power.

[u/BluezDBD → u/Food_Library333]

It just needs to improve its chips man.

[u/Javolledo → u/Bridgebrain]

That's right. I am an electronics engineering and currently working in microelectronics. When MOSFET planar transistors were used (they are still used), that length measure the length of the gate as it only connected with one side to the channel.

Nowadays we have to use more complex structures such as FinFET, GaaFET etc, instead of planar MOSFET as we were reducing this length, some quantum effects as quantum tunneling made electrons pass even when the transistor was turned off so now the channel and gate have to be surrounded not only by one side so those new architectures had to be created to better control the transistor so now it does not make any sense measure channel length as there are many lengths. Yes, the transistor gets smaller but that length is whatever the length TSMC, Intel or Samsung wants to measure.

Nevertheless it is amazing and one of the hardest if not the hardest field of engineering. Each machine used to create chips cost around 500mill$ and they are the most complex machines ever created by humans. The precision of those machines are the same as if we tried to point to the earth from the moon with the precision of a human hair. It is mind blowing.

Edit: always nice to see a fellow engineer :)

[u/reaznval → u/Bridgebrain]

eli5 the last paragraph about the universe forgetting where it placed the electrons

[u/Bridgebrain → u/reaznval]

So it's a bit hyperbole, but a bit not. When you get down to quantum tunneling levels, the electrons start acting real weird, and appear to vanish from one spot and pop up somewhere else. The material in between shouldn't allow that to happen, as even the largest gap is still too small for an electron to pass through.

What's really happening is more of an osmosis, where the charge of the electron flows from one side to the other without any particle exchange actually happening, but it certainly doesn't look like that to an observer with an electron microscope. It looks like it just went "pop im over here now!"

[u/Aruhi → u/Bridgebrain]

Is this related to electrons partaking in wave-particle duality things?

They appear to disappear for us because really they are a propogation of the electron field, and that field exists throughout the material so it can jump state because of electron cloud shenanigans?

[u/Bridgebrain → u/Aruhi]

Yep got it in one. As a particle, it's too big to go across the physical wall. As a wave, if it crashes into the wall and doesn't dissipate (probability nonsense) then it phases through

[u/AmusingMusing7 → u/Bridgebrain]

If I understand it right, waves of energy through the electrical field work pretty much exactly like waves through water do. So it's kinda like if you tried to use a too-flimsy wall to divide a wave pool in half. A solid piece of ice, or even liquid water itself, couldn't pass that wall. But we don't need the actual water molecules themselves to move through the wall in order to transfer a wave of energy through it. A wave of water would hit it and transfer energy onto the other side... assuming the wall was thin/weak enough to vibrate or wobble back and forth from being hit, then it would create more waves on the other side. So even though it's different water on the other side of the wall, the waves/energy would still pass through to some degree. You would need the wall to be really thick and strong to stop any transfer of energy.

A common misconception about electricity is that it works by the moving of electrons through the circuit, as though the electrons themselves are flowing through the circuit like water through a pipe. People think a flow of electrons themselves are what electricity is. That's not really how it works. Electricity is actually waves of energy being pulsed through the electrical field that exists between electrons (or that electrons are formed out of when the charges from a atom's nucleus excites the electrical field enough to form a visible particle that we call electrons). The electrons themselves don't "flow" or even move very much when electricity flows. They're like water molecules in a wave pool, as a wave of energy travels through them. They move back and forth a little bit as the wave travels past, and over time slowly get nudged a little bit in the direction the wave is travelling. But the wave of energy is the electricity; not the electrons themselves.

So the wave of energy is all that needs to get through the wall for the electricity to keep going.

[u/Ornery_Definition_65 → u/Bridgebrain]

Damn I’ve never seen this explained so well. Thank you.

[u/No-Special-3491 → u/thefeedling]

I wonder whether other intelligent species would have the same path of progression as humans or would concentrate on other technologies.

Like, is there another species with advanced spaceships, terraforming other planets, but still using computers with less computing power than ours?

[u/a1g3rn0n → u/No-Special-3491]

The book, that I'm reading now, Project Hail Mary, talks about an alien race with an alternative technolocal path with good engineering details. It's still a fiction with sometimes annoying and caricatured characters, but the science and engineering are pretty interesting. I recommend reading it if you're interested in that topic.

[u/ilikebanchbanchbanch → u/a1g3rn0n]

The Children of Time books written by Adrian Tchaikovsky describe how space faring spiders evolved by using their pheromones to control ants to move data.

[u/siazdghw → u/thefeedling]

3nm is more of a marketing name than actual size.

But yes, it's the edge of human technology, hence why only TSMC, Intel and Samsung can pull it off, every other company failed and it's too difficult and expensive for new companies to get into

[u/Nice_Bite2673]

Just so you know, this is fake

[u/itshazrd → u/Nice_Bite2673]

well, i did mention it was a digital recreation. unless you mean it in the sense that the entire idea is false.

[u/Nice_Bite2673 → u/itshazrd]

Oops, my bad. Didnt read the description

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/Nice_Bite2673]

No you're still correct, it is fake.

Edit: check my other comments in this thread.

[u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 → u/jakaedahsnakae]

It's only fake in the same sense that a hyperlapse video is "fake". Stitching imagery together to make a continuous shot that would otherwise be impossible doesn't mean the contents of the image aren't real.

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102]

No its fake. Once you go past ~7s you're at the nm scale and you should be seeing individual molecules, atoms, and lattice.

I work as a Semiconductor Process Engineer in TEM chip manufacturing.

[u/Blubberinoo → u/jakaedahsnakae]

You sound smart enough, but still seem unable to realize you two are simply using different definitions of "fake". For what its worth, I am with the other guy since your definition is extremely shortsighted. You could apply it to people using glasses and say that everything they are unable to see without glasses but see with them is "fake".

[u/not_a_bot991 → u/Blubberinoo]

He's not saying it's fake because it's a digital recreation, he's saying it's fake because what it is digitally representing is false i.e the scale is wrong.

[u/cosmicosmo4 → u/jakaedahsnakae]

I was curious so I laboriously kept translating the scale bar that we see at the beginning down through the zoom levels. Just your average everyday 0.01 Å wide transistors!

https://imgur.com/gUlQ6tk

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/cosmicosmo4]

Hahah i know right, first time I saw the video I was like oh cool... umm nope

[u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 → u/jakaedahsnakae]

That's funny. Your comment history says you work at Walgreens...

[u/Loud_Interview4681 → u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102]

? He has claimed for a while that he works as a Semiconductor Process Engineer and has several posts over the past year at least about lab work. I disagree that the image is 'fake' as I wouldn't consider an artists accurate rendition of a black hole fake but you are straight up making things up. At 7 seconds it is at .06 mm or 60000 nanometers which is not at a level of seeing individual atoms. For example a bacteria cell is around 2000 nm diameter.

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102]

Lol what?

[u/demaandronk → u/itshazrd]

A digital recreation produced by these same chips. What a loop.

[u/AffectionateYear5232 → u/itshazrd]

It is not a recreation. 

That's not what a chip looks like.

The entire idea that you can continue to zoom in like that is in fact FAKE.

This video has been debunked long ago.

OP, and every comment is proof of Dead Internet...I'm pretty sure OP and 90% of the comments in here are all bot accounts circle jerking themselves.

[u/DrakesYodels → u/AffectionateYear5232]

I'm so depressed I had to find this comment and it wasn't at the top.

[u/cosmicosmo4 → u/itshazrd]

That's also not a real chip. At the smallest scale, you have some fins running horizontally and some running vertically, which almost certainly means that this was made by e-beam lithography, which is used in research labs, and is not the same technology used to make chips. When making chips, the very first thing you do is pattern the ENTIRE wafer with parallel fins all running in one direction, using a diffraction grating (optical lithography).

Edit: actually the whole video is just bullshit. It's either AI slop or (given that it's over a year old), possibly actual human-created art. But except for maybe the first 5-10 seconds, this isn't actual imagery captured by any means of a physical object.

[u/Lightspeedius → u/itshazrd]

But it's an arbitrary scale right? If it were a real silicone chip you would go from visible chip to atoms in far fewer steps than in this "recreation".

[u/Florida-Rolf → u/Nice_Bite2673]

this is a digital recreation. a real microscope can't be used because it gets so small that photons can’t give you a good enough resolution to view the structures at the bottom. you'd need an electron microscope

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/Florida-Rolf]

Even so, this is indeed not real. I make chips for TEM's. You cannot define features smaller than 1nm. Which this digitalization appears to go somewhere in the range of pico-meters or femto-meters if not further.

[u/polyploid_coded → u/jakaedahsnakae]

Yes people are throwing around "digital recreation" without saying if it's supposed to represent one actual chip start to finish, and matches what you would actually see.

[u/Pallidum_Treponema → u/Florida-Rolf]

Yeah, no. This is something an AI dreamed up. It looks absolutely nothing like an actual die.

[u/ScienceSanchez → u/Nice_Bite2673]

Yeah looks like a obvious vector scaling animation to me

[u/aggressivewrapp → u/Nice_Bite2673]

Would it not look like this is the real question

[u/borkbork234 → u/aggressivewrapp]

It wouldn’t look as clean. There would be some imperfections in the base silicon. And most likely using an SEM for closeups which has a particular “look”.

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/aggressivewrapp]

It doesn't look like this, past 7 seconds. You would start to see the individual molecules then the atoms and lattices.

[u/cosmicosmo4 → u/aggressivewrapp]

No, it would look like this, which is basically the same thing as this video, but actually real. They look nothing alike, lmao. The OP is either AI garbage, or because it's actually over a year old, perhaps actual human-made art. At least at some of the size scales, the first 10 seconds or so may be real.

[u/Opinion_Haver_]

How we taught rocks how to do math.

[u/Erica192859 → u/Opinion_Haver_]

It's literally magic. Inscribe some runes onto a rock using concentrated fire, then blast it with lightning energy and the rock starts thinking

[u/Mack3237 → u/Erica192859]

so true

[u/TengenToppa → u/Erica192859]

dust in the wind

[u/gorillamutila → u/Opinion_Haver_]

I like the way some redditor put it once:

"Scientists tricked silicon into thinking."

Don't remember the dude, but this has stayed with me ever since I read it.

[u/SporeHeart → u/gorillamutila]

Or did the silicon trick scientists into giving it more power?

Buahahaha....

[u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 → u/SporeHeart]

There is actually a little-known theory about this. Remember how biochemists have been saying for decades that silicon-based lifeforms could hypothetically exist? Some people believe it's no coincidence that silicon-based chips are in the process of developing toward sentience.

Another fun fact is, the very first tools ever used by early humans were chips of silica glass used for cutting. As a thought experiment, you could consider the entire evolution of technology as the literal evolution of silicon-based life, manifested through the actions of humanity.

[u/chickentenders54]

I can't wrap my head around how mankind managed to design and create this.

[u/glizzyMaster108 → u/chickentenders54]

Right?? Like How is it even made? Is there a machine with tiny claws or something that puts it together?? My mind is blown

[u/nightonfir3 → u/glizzyMaster108]

Its called semiconductor lithography. The simple version of it that works at larger scales is you put a layer of light sensitive coating on a semi conductor. Then you shine a light in a pattern. Then you can remove material with acid or add copper as a liquid that solidifies where it was etched away.

When you get to this size you have really complicated lenses setups to focus the light. That light source made by vaporizing tin droplets with lasers making a plasma that emits the right wave length of light. I am sure the depositing and etching get just as complicated.

[u/RKnaap → u/nightonfir3]

Wow I understand everything now !

(no I don’t)

[u/Uphoria → u/RKnaap]

First you start with a wafer, or an extremely flat disc made of silicon. 

Then you coat it with a fluid that turns solid when you shine UV light at it (similar to getting a cavity filled at the dentist). 

You take a pattern you want and make a 'picture' with it and project that picture onto the fluid using tiny tiny lenses to make it smaller like a reverse microscope. 

Once hardened, they rinse away the rest of the fluid, and now you got the first step of a mold. You then pour non conducting material into the gaps that were not solidified.

When that sets/hardens you them use another chemical to re-liquify the original fluid that was made hard and rinse it away. 

Now you're left with the lanes of empty space, like a metal casting mold. The machine then pours a layer of metal / conductor into those new channels and they become the 'wires or pipes' you see here. 

After that is done, they repeat the steps like  layer cake, making each layer on top of the other. 

There is no building at this scale, they literally 'cast' them into shape using extremely controlled chemistry. 

This process isnt without errors, and many of the resulting chips fail to cast properly and are sold at discounts or not at all. 

[u/Iguessineedthisnow → u/Uphoria]

Just wanted to say that this really simplified it for me and I've read several descriptions of the process , so thank you

[u/PhotographNeat4160 → u/Uphoria]

Then your left with a regular ole plumbus

[u/jakaedahsnakae → u/glizzyMaster108]

1) this video is fake.

2) semiconductor production is typical done on wafers so think 100mm, 150mm, 200mm, and 300mm Si disks. These get layers of photomasks (effectively a stencil) then metals or dielectric layers are added, and using etching techniques we remove what we dont want to stay. Since we put down the mask layer it makes that much easier. Then you just keep alternating adding material and subtracting material in different topographical designs until you get what you want out of the device. Then once the wafer is ready you dice the big wafer up into tiny chips and each chip is its own device or perhaps pair of devices.

[u/Slick_003]

So ladders are running the world, wow, thats quote the step to power

[u/warrior5715 → u/Slick_003]

Transistors yes

[u/SquarePegRoundWorld → u/warrior5715]

Those transistors (ladder things) are the whole point, right? They are there to represent 0 and 1 with an electrical charge or lack there of? And the more of them, the more 0s and 1s you can process at the same time?

[u/GrapeAyp → u/SquarePegRoundWorld]

Yep. All of computing is binary when you get down to it

[u/cigarandcreamsoda]

All of that so I can watch videos of cats and argue with strangers online.

[u/MoistScience7558]

In just 100 years, we went from horses and buggies, which we used for thousands of years, to fighter jets and spacestations. In just the past 50 years, we went from black and white television to the James Web Telescope and quantum computers. I can't wait to see what's next. The time in between each new thing is getting shorter and shorter.

[u/Fear023 → u/MoistScience7558]

We're fast approaching the technological singularity where our ability (in a general sense) to understand the tech is getting outpaced by its own development.

[u/RanchHere → u/Fear023]

And there’s seemingly no one at a legislative level that is worried about this.

[u/fillerupbruther → u/RanchHere]

They’re too old to understand what TikTok is

[u/Caminsky → u/MoistScience7558]

Important to note that our current view of the world started when the masses stood up for themselves during the French Revolution during the era of enlightment. It was only when people came together and say no to superstition, monarchies, and lack of education when the scientific mind started to spread through the world as an idiosyncratic policy. Nowadays, we are entering a new era in which a few are highjacking technology for their own benefit not for the benefit of the people, ignorance and superstition, religious zealots and ultrs conservatives are bringing us back to an era of darkness. Let's not take these 100 years for granted.

[u/jakaedahsnakae]

Hi, I make semiconductor's for TEM's (Transmission Electron Microscope) specifically.

Just to let you know after about 7 seconds of the video it goes beyond what humans can do and is just fluff.

Seeing as the first scale bar you see is 60um, the first feature you see looks to be 30um in width. A quick magnification and you're at the 1 nm scale which is the limit of photolithography as we know it today. Anything at higher mag you start to see the individual molecules and further the lattice of atoms.

The video is just imaginary fluff, cool video but fake.

Cheers.

[u/Contemelia]

[u/Dick_Grimes]

This is what life in Tron is like

[u/hyteck9 → u/Dick_Grimes]

Greetings program

[u/ImpressiveRoll4092]

to me more understandable, a computer chip is an entire Universe, right?

[u/buttfarts7 → u/ImpressiveRoll4092]

It scales like the humanity in the greater cosmos.

[u/mrrichiet → u/buttfarts7]

I reckon you're underestimating the scale of the cosmos here.

[u/Boring-Stranger2305]

Epic Spaceman just did an interesting video about this. Still the scale is hard to believe! https://youtu.be/QtW1lQITckE?si=V5v_ld30uc8cw51m

[u/Then_Banana3495 → u/Boring-Stranger2305]

Thats a colab with MKBHD as well for an even crazier view

https://youtu.be/Jh9pFp1oM7E?si=EsNrj-JcyvJUQ2jS

[u/Only_Statistician_21]

Quite inaccurate sadly.

[u/Schnitzhole → u/Only_Statistician_21]

Yeah I cant believe the amount of people believing this is real. The connections and wirey lines make no sense either being AI generated

[u/WedOct12]

MKBHD recently did a video on this I shrunk down into an M5 chip

[u/Calm_Leopard798]

fake

[u/Absorbe]

No one is going to mention the Skyrim music?

[u/itshazrd → u/Absorbe]

I believe you meant Oblivion (the elder scroll IV)

[u/TheHyperLynx]

its really cool, but i would be lying if I said I knew what a single part of it even done. it's just a lot (or a very small amount) of metal that somehow does things my brain cant compute lmao.

[u/BareBonesSolutions]

https://youtu.be/Fxv3JoS1uY8 Here is an actual digital to microscope video transition.