.png)
As our humanity advances more in technological progress, we use electronic devices more and surround our life with them. We can't imagine ourselves without our phones, headphones, cars and other tools that comfort our life. While all these might seem so distant from each other, they are mostly made from same resources or even same parts. One thing in particular unites all these tools in something very small in size, but very grand in its usefulness - microchips. Microchips are very small squares made from silicon, usually of sizes 200 mm^2. These microchips are then packed in a little bigger square, tightly packed in huge cardboard boxes and sold for hundreds of dollars. At first, it's hard to understand how such small things get sold for so much, especially knowing that silicon is the second most common material in the earth’s crust.
The silicon in the microchips is very pure - 99.9999999% pure. Directly from earth we extract silicon that is bonded to O2, and the main goal of chip manufacturers is to get rid of it as much as possible. The easiest way to get lots of SiO2 is from silicates, such as quartz.
The first step of manufacturing chips is to smelt the quartz and add Carbon to it. The simplified reaction of that process is SiO2 + C -> Si + CO2. At high temperatures, bonds between silicon and oxygen are broken, and oxygen combines with carbon instead to make CO2, leaving only silicon behind.
Once the Silicon is separated, it is either left to cool off on its own and then later cut into pieces or gets gathered using Czochralski method. In this method, a small rod is rotated slowly into the pure molten silicon, and then very slowly extracted.
The rod is so slowly taken out, that the surface tension between the crystal and the melt doesn’t break. Instead, it holds onto the melt and gets taken out carefully, creating a silicon wafer. To crystallize the entire melt, it can take several days.
Once this is done, the wafer is cut into small thin discs, and gets coated on the surface with a non-conducting layer of Silicon Dioxide. Later, the discs go through lithography where they get covered with light-resistant materials. The next step is where the flat circles get printed into the actual microchips, by getting exposed to UV light containing chips blueprint.
More interesting details on microchip production can be found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Qav3vIv9s&ab_channel=InterestingEngineering
Once the microchips go through a lot of more processes, we get a small square with an area of a fingernail that contains billions of transistors, capacitors, resistors. Capacitors store electrical charges; resistors help control strength of an electrical current and transistors can switch direction of an electrical current or make it only go one way.
Since the dawn of time, we share information between each other the most practical way we can. Before humans were gifted with intelligence, we communicated with signals; once our bodies developed more, we began talking and we could pass information between each other better and faster. And once we discovered writing, we started discovering more and more technologies of talking on a distance: mails, telegraphs, radios. And fast forward to present time – we are sending hundreds of millions of messages per minute, each message being a sequence of electrical charges that go through millions of transistors. All this is possible because of our developed technology of semi-conductors and their unique properties.
Other interesting resources:
More details on how details on how microchips are made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QKzS_w_Ko0&ab_channel=3rabGeeks another interesting technology: flying microchip the size of a sand particle!
Comments