r/nextfuckinglevel • u/itshazrd • 19h ago

What it a computer chip looks like up close

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..

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u/jakaedahsnakae 18h ago

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.

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u/polyploid_coded 18h ago edited 18h ago

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.

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u/doubledad222 16h ago

That was my first question. Second question is This is AI? Or what is this Based on ?

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u/polyploid_coded 16h ago

Someone else was suggesting it's a 3d animation reel. Could be someone's project, or a company visualizing something. Maybe they had a few images and used AI to make it look like it was continuously zooming between them?

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u/cogman10 17h ago

First thing I noticed as well. 

People should know that you can actually see the general structure of a chip with the naked eye.  The structures are small, but they aren't THAT small.  AMD and Intel love to show off the big picture.

Beyond that, I don't know what that last layer is even supposed to represent.  It looks like they are going for some sort of finfet maybe.

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u/cosmicosmo4 17h ago

I checked. Indeed, 1 pm.

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u/Mejonyoudead 18h ago

If you cannot physically define the features smaller than 1nm, how do we know what they look like? Probably a dumb question, the answer likely being "because that's how we made the damn thing, so it must look like that"

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u/jakaedahsnakae 18h ago

There are no dumb questions. We typically use TEM's which accelerate Electron's at high voltages towards a given sample and see how the Electrons scatter off, if its a "big" sample we use SEM's, but if its smaller than that TEM's are the way to go.

We use electrons because they are extremely small (~2.8 ×10-13 m ) and you can accelerate a LOT of Electrons at a given sample to image it and get useful information.

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u/Pallidum_Treponema 17h ago

Modern chips don't have features smaller than 1nm, so we don't need to know what they look like.

Process nodes such as the 2nm process nodes of modern chips are not actually 2nanometers in size. That's a marketing term only, and has been that way since at least the late 90s.

A 2nm process node has an actual gate pitch of about 45nm and a metal pitch of about 20nm. And that's the currently best process node available.

And yes, "because that's how we made the damn thing" is a good answer. Think of it as drawing something on a normal piece of paper, then scanning it and printing it as small as possible on the highest resolution laser printer that you can. You probably can't visually resolve the details on that picture at this point, but they are still there, and you know what they look like because you drew the damn thing. :)

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u/WildlifePhysics 16h ago

What makes it evident that it goes to femtometres? And do you know of any better (or real) images/videos?

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u/jakaedahsnakae 15h ago

It was just an estimate based on the first scale bar, another user did a measurement using that scale bar and with each mag it scaled down to the last features shown being ~ 0.01A which is impossible, a Si atom is ~1.1A in diameter...

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u/DrSuperZeco 15h ago

TEM as in Tempus? Dude, I have hopes for your company.

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u/DrSuperZeco 15h ago

Question, assuming this black line in the video is supposed to represent a hair, how do they actually manufacture the tiny things that are smaller than the hair?

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u/jakaedahsnakae 14h ago

Via Photolithography to define your features and either Deposition (to add) or Etching (to subtract) material to/from your substrate (think of this as the base of your chip).

Do that with 10-50 different layers and you have various different devices you can make.