Chip Tycoon: A Rollercoaster Tycoon-Inspired Animation Shows How Chips Are Made
Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
Chip Tycoon is an interactive animation that turns chip manufacturing into a theme park ride. A cart carries a silicon wafer through 20 stages, from sand to finished chips, with each stop explaining the process. The park's ring layout reflects the repetitive printing of layers, and the guide offers controls for pacing and exploration. The content is accurate, with real process steps and typical numbers, and it's built with plain polygons on a canvas.
Making a chip is not carving or assembling. It is printing.
- nylonstrung
Running a chip fab would actually make a pretty good Factorio-style automation game with perhaps puzzle elements inside the lithography device and in the tape out portion
- BugsJustFindMe
I think the chosen visualization detracts from learning rather than enhancing it. A simple, static flowchart would be more informative, easier to consume, and almost certainly less buggy and confusing to interact with.
- j_walter
This is pretty good...simplifies the process and some of the items are out of order, but it describes the process pretty well.
Keep in mind, even 20 year old chips have 6-700 steps in their process...it's a giant loop of Etch, Photo, Implantation, Furnace, Chemical Vapor Deposition, Physical Vapor Deposition, Chemical Mechanical Planarization, etc...don't forget the measurement steps and defect scans. State of the art chips take 3-4 months to complete this process and it's well over a thousand steps.
- skrebbel
First time I’ve seen a lithography machine referred to as “a printer”. Is that really what they call it in fabs?
- vivzkestrel
- added to my list of S-Tier resources on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183198