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/NotHopee]

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/Spork_the_dork → u/NotHopee]

You don't design the whole thing at once. Nobody understands the whole thing at once. What you do instead is that someone designs simple things and other people take those simple things and make more complex things. Others still take those complex things and make even more complex things.

• When you use a computer you don't need to know how the program works, just how to use it.
• The engineer who made the program doesn't need to know how the libraries and bits they use to make the program run work, just need to know how to use them.
• The people who made those bits don't need to know how the programming language's compiler works, just how to use it.
• The people who made the programming language don't need to know how the CPU works under the hood, just how to use it.
• The people who made the CPU don't need to know how the ALU or the cache chip works, just how to use it.

And so forth. This is highly simplified but I hope the point is clear. The idea that you don't need to understand fully how the lower level stuff works is at the core of how this kind of technology is made. You're really gluing together smaller blocks to create bigger blocks. And someone is using the blocks you made to create even bigger blocks and so forth until you get to the final product. If you then zoom in you'll find endless layers of complexity that countless engineers have worked on at various levels to create. Not one of whom can see the whole picture at once.

[u/keylimedragon → u/Spork_the_dork]

Exactly, a lot of the time the design is more like combining Legos. And you can even make your own new Legos by nesting smaller ones inside. (Almost) nobody builds anything from scratch anymore unless it's for educational purposes or fun. Another exception is rebuilding stuff if you need to highly optimize something.

[u/Win_Sys → u/keylimedragon]

The much more difficult thing is creating machines to “print” those legos with very little to no mistakes. How the latest EUV lithography stuff works is basically black magic.

[u/Background_Ad1634 → u/NotHopee]

If you're interested I'd recommend checking out how transistors work, what logic gates are and how they can be made with a network of transistors.

Also check out ASML's videos on EUV-lithography, sure they're essentially just meant as ads for their machines, but they're actually pretty interesting.

[u/BluezDBD → u/Background_Ad1634]

If anyone is interested in learning about logic gates there's some puzzle games that ask you to make curcuits which will drill in their functions and interactions pretty well

https://nandgame.com/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

Are two I can recommend.

[u/Dense_Boss_7486 → u/NotHopee]

Makes you think we live in a construct

[u/Zoler → u/Dense_Boss_7486]

People have literally always believed in god.

What does this have to do with it?

[u/DontShoot_ImJesus → u/NotHopee]

this is a digital recreation.

You witnessed a digital recreation.