From sand to software.
20 walk-throughs, each a scroll of chapters with a scene you can turn and controls you can change. New to chips? Start with the first: one chip, five measures. Then follow a bare wafer through the building, follow the money, and end with what a chip actually does.
Start here.
One chip, five measures.
Start here: one chip measured five ways, each by the publisher that measured it. How small, how fast, how repeatable, how costly and how widely shared out, down to the chips laws and export rules governments published since 2019.
From sand to chip.
From sand to wafer.
Before the fab: silicon counted in nines, grown as one perfect crystal from a pot of melt, sawn with wire and polished to a mirror.
Anatomy of a fab.
The building as a machine: six layers, falling air, a railway on the ceiling, and a route a wafer takes a thousand times.
Writing with light.
How a lithography scanner prints a chip, from the projector principle to EUV tin plasma and double patterning.
The impossible machine.
Precision times speed: the stages of ASML's EUV scanners beside Nikon's, full and half fields, overlay counted in silicon atoms, and a minute a layer in a factory that takes weeks.
Sculpting in atoms.
Etch and deposition: plasma chambers, holes fifty to a hundred times deeper than wide, and films grown a few atomic layers at a time.
Wrapping the gate.
How the transistor went 3D, cut open: a flat switch and its leak, Intel's 14 nm fins, nanosheets down to their silicon atoms, power from below and stacked pairs.
What “2 nm” means.
The “2 nm” in a node’s name, set against what can be measured: gate and metal pitches at true scale, from a virus down to silicon atoms, transistors per square micrometre, and the IEEE roadmap stacking upward.
Finding the defect.
Inspection and metrology: zoom from a 300 mm wafer to a 10 nm defect at true scale, light against electrons, how a lot is sampled, and the lots at risk until a drift is caught.
Chips on chips.
How AI chips are packaged: stacks of HBM memory, copper vias through silicon, microbumps against hybrid bonds, and interposers stitched from several reticle fields.
Follow the money.
What a chip costs.
Dies per wafer, killer defects and yield: the cost of one good chip, calculated live from numbers you set.
What a fab buys.
Where the money in a new fab goes: about half on machines by SIA and BCG's count, the 2025 tool market as floor space, and depreciation on every wafer, calculated from numbers you set.
How fast can you build a fab?.
Terafab against the builders who never announce anything: its stated size and goal beside real buildings, real fabs and the machines on the critical path. A dated edition, updated each quarter.
Only three left.
The count of chipmakers at each node as CSET counted it in 2019, the newest fabs on one ground, and what a design and a year of capital spending cost, each with its publisher.
The memory cycle.
How memory prices boom and bust: the pig cycle from a 1926 USDA bulletin and Ezekiel's cobweb theorem, three real memory fabs on one clock, eighteen years of DRAM busts in the companies' own words, and a model of the cycle you can break yourself.
Where a chip gets made.
One chip, many countries, on a real globe: the eight kinds of work at one scale, where the firms that do each have their headquarters, the route SIA and BCG drew for one phone chip, and five chokepoints, each with its publisher and year.
Power and water.
What a fab consumes: electricity, ultrapure water and fluorinated gases. TSMC's share of Taiwan's electricity by our arithmetic, a fab and its water plant cut open, one wafer's water in baths and pools, and a day's water at four places, each as its publisher measured it.
What a chip does.
From switch to software.
How a switch becomes software: gates built from transistors, an adder whose carry you can watch ripple, memory cells that hold a bit, and a 32-bit RISC-V instruction.
A billion ticks a second.
Clock speed explained: how long one tick lasts and how far light travels in it, processor clocks from 1971 to 2014 as data, several instructions a tick, more cores, and Apple's systems on a chip.
The limits.
How far can lithography go?.
How far lithography can go, route by route: prints as makers and labs report them, photons counted, light from accelerators, five routes to a pitch near 16 nm, stamping, electron beams, single atoms and prints bigger than one field, each with its publisher.
Each explainer names the publishers its figures come from. Scenes are illustrations; readouts say when a number is arithmetic rather than a published figure.