Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation | Hacker News Reader

Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation

laurentiugabriel.github.io

213 pointslaurentiurad74 comments

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.

A miracle masterpiece in every device and we throw them out in 3 years.

In some cases yes, in others no. As much as I love my new electronics I still play my 14 year old Xbox One, read on my 2012 Kindle Paperwhite and use multiple 5+ year old laptops that function almost the same as they did (running Linux helps). 3 years is not really the lifetime of most consumer electronics anymore...at least outside of the latest GPUs.

The latest GPUs will also be functional for longer than 3 years. They may or may not still be economically efficient for LLM companies to operate.

I work at an ewaste recycling company. Most of what we get is corporate IT department decommissions. It seems like most companies run things for about 5 to 10 years, as most desktops, laptops, and servers I've seen lately have 4th to 10th gen Intel CPUs, peaking around 8th gen. We occasionally get something with DDR5, but it's rare and often broken. If anything is sufficiently valuable, we try to resell it.[0]

[0] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling

Who's "we" I have an R-Zone and a typewriter 3 feet away from me right now.

Months?! Wow, I had no idea. So it's a very long pipeline.

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.

- added to my list of S-Tier resources on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183198

Does the S stand for slop?

- I have a process on my end for bookmarking

- The most visual explainers get S-Tier ranking

- Good info from reputed sources gets an A, non reputed gets B

- Opinion blogs are at the bottom of the barrel and maybe ranked C, D, E and even F depending on quality

- it is explained in the link too

How does S compare to F if F is the bottom-of-the-barrel worst?

Or does it just stand for slop? Your link doesn’t mention it anywhere

S-tier comes from games. An A to F scale with S representing a "super" or "superior" rating has been around in that space quite a bit longer than LLMs.

- it also comes from one punch man

- the greatest heroes are in the S-Tier

- A ranking heroes are the second best

- Then B, C, D, E, F....

I always thought it came from the Japanese school rating system, where the concept was transferred to the west through the medium of games. I was under the impression that this system preceded the creation of video games but I can not find a reference for that.

In Japan the "S" is explained as shū (秀) "Exemplary, excellent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United...

Thanks a lot!

At the end the truckload of chips should be happily on its way to a consumer electronics factory when it gets suddenly diverted along with all the others down a side road that dumps all the chips into the ravenous insatiable maw of the hyperscale datacenter industry.

Cute, but the steps don't make sense. E.g. each cycle shows both an ion gun and wire deposition. But only the first layer would use the ion gun, and only the following layers would have metal deposited. (Front End of Line vs Back End of Line). Not to mention the lack of diffusion and oxidation. The whole "loop" metaphor gives the wrong idea of what's happening.

Also "The pattern is photographed onto the wafer."... shudder.

All subtly wrong. And no, not in the 'simplified' sense.

Why is it wrong? Asking as I am keen to correct it

Because it's not the correct term. And that's not the only thing that's wrong, see the parent comment.

With all due respect, I would recommend you run any educational resources and infographics you create past an actual subject matter expert (not an LLM!) before release. Otherwise you're just spreading shiny misinformation.

Yet you didn't say what is wrong. What is the purpose of your comment? Might not be photographed but projected through a photomask. Does it change the semantics? No. This is not a guide for developing a fab, just to be clear.

I told you - it's not the correct term. Finding the correct one should be something you can achieve in 5 minutes of research, and then you can confirm your understanding with a SME.

To be clear, I am also not an expert - I can pick out things that are wrong because I generally know a thing or two about semiconductor fabrication, but I'm not willing to sign-off on correctness of the whole thing, especially wrt. to modern processes. I personally wouldn't publish anything about this matter without getting it checked by someone else, because I know where the limits of my knowledge are.

The goal of my comment was to bring that to your attention - that you need someone to actually review your content before you continue teaching people the wrong thing. When you're educating people, you're in a position of power that comes with the responsibility of making sure what you write is as correct and clear as possible. You have a duty of care.

So you posted a comment, then refused to give details because I can do it myself "in 5 minutes of research"? Like I said previously, this is not meant to be sent to TSMC so they know what to do when opening their new fab in Arizona.

The point is that it's not a credible resource, and one or two point corrections from randos who can see some of the errors are not likely to change that.

they haven't pointed any corrections, just complained that something is wrong, which it isn't, it's just wording preference. You nailed it: just two randos on the internet making a statement, nothing that challenges the accuracy of the info.

q3k, you don't know anything about wafers/chips, you are just triggered by AI usage in all your comments. Please give constructive feedback instead of, this uses AI and its just wrong.

I've refurbished multiple PVD systems, I'm setting up a DIY e-beam lithography rig for Cr-on-glass photomask making and I'm bringing up an 80's photolithography mask aligner / exposure system. I've even built some terrible Al/Si(P-type) Schottky junctions already. I'm not completely clueless.

I am taking notes about how to make chips in my garage.

Nice website. One problem, though: the animation goes too fast for my reading speed, so I have to click stop. Then when I click on the next thing, I have to click stop again. Very annoying. If I click stop, just make it stay stopped until I click play again (which I won't).

Same here. You can press space after going to the next building as a workaround.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

great video!

Did someone recently release a library (or skill.md [0]) for making these sorts of visualisations?

It looks strikingly like the LLM explainer someone posted a few days ago.

[0] I ask this bit in the "About" makes me wonder: "No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas."

If it's TokenTown, then it's my project :) There's no skill file AFAIK, at least I didn't create one.

It was!

FWIW, my comment may have come off as more dismissive than I meant--it's a cool approach. I'd just never seen a visualization quite that like and then ran into two in the same week.

No worries at all!

BTW I created a skill in the end for this type of animations: https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel/learnscape

Cool! Will check it out!

Here's a video in case anyone else is also curious about what the crystal puller part looks like:

https://youtu.be/zVq8o9mgugc?si=YouOXIbJEEsDJS4z&t=135

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

I am on it

well don't stop there, tell us more

https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/euv-lithography/ -> something more specialized and still not finished, but willing to create a Factorio-style game on how EUV litography works.

Captain of Industry has a simple chain that requires looping to add all layers, so there is that. Anything more complicated and it will look more like Zachtronics game.

I'll be honest, as someone who enjoys industrial food science, I felt a small pang of disappointment when I realized this was about integrated circuits.

Yeah I mean, imagine that… an article about integrated circuits… on hacker news… completely unexpected.

Same here, I scratched my head for couple of seconds after seeing that first step is "Sand" thinking "maybe it starts with planting potatoes" :D

haha sorry about that :D

First time I’ve seen a lithography machine referred to as “a printer”. Is that really what they call it in fabs?

It's meant for people that do not have extensive knowledge over how chips are made. I doubt majority of the people know what lithography means, let alone DUV EUV etc.

I hear the word "stepper" used sometimes talking about lithography machines. Makes sense I suppose that you'd need to precisely move the wafer around and expose small parts of it.

AIUI it does step,expose,step,expose,step,expose,...

The newer machines don’t step but scan.

Great Work! I always wanted to make this kind of thing but targeted for ASML EVU machine! This is so great.

That would really be awesome to see! It's one of the most complex machines that humans ever produced.

I've read part one of Material World a few weeks ago and the semiconductor bit was really mind-blowing.

this was pleasantly instructive, thanks for sharing!

I love this, this is incredible!

I loved this so much. Thank you

I was hoping for potato chips

Pretty informative, thanks.

"I want to get off of this cart."

I was hoping this was going to be about french fries, but I'm not disappointed

good one! Thanks!

Nice idea, but ...

> reading stop · press Space to hold it here

... what 'Space'? On phone.

It was AI generated, don't be to demanding ;)

AI generated or not, the target device was the PC, but the point still stands. Anyway, you have a pause button that you can click to pause the flow. On PC you might not use the mouse that extensively so pressing Space saves time. It's just a nitpick that I haven't removed the Space reference on mobile, but you can still pause the flow.

I created Chip Tycoon as an animated visualization of the semiconductor manufacturing process, inspired by the classic isometric style of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. Rather than reading through a long article, you can watch silicon move through the major manufacturing stages—from wafer fabrication and lithography to packaging and testing—in a miniature factory.

My goal was to make one of the world's most complex manufacturing processes easier to understand by turning it into something that feels alive and enjoyable to watch.

It's neat, but I'm not entirely sure what the animations contribute. What's neat about games like RollerCoaster Tycoon is watching this entire map full of things happening without needing to be controlled, but this doesn't really have that. There's your vehicle moving around, and there's people wandering around, but they're not doing anything. It doesn't feel like a factory of connected components.

I thought it was cute.

The RCT style didn't really add anything other than showing it on a conveyor belt of sorts, but it was cute and in a world where HTML and CSS are practically free to make, we might as well spend some tokens on making educational content a bit more digestible.

I'm sure there's a plaintext essay that can explain this just as well if the RCT style was distracting.

Mission achieved: It's cute.

Some feedback on the UI. Just knowing there was an automatic timer made me feel rushed while reading each expanded step (regardless of speed selected), so I tried to manually take over the navigation, by using the pause button, next step button, and tapping factories. This caused my conveyor cart to somehow become decoupled from the current step and felt kind of buggy.

I also felt trapped in the Loop, which went around 3 times. I didn't notice an exit button. Better yet, this is a transition where perhaps a swift animation of the cart going around a few times on its way to the next step may help communicate the sense of repetitiveness you're trying to make the user feel.

I was on mobile and I noticed by the end of the park my phone had gotten quite noticeably hot - which is unusual except when under heavy gaming load.

Thanks for putting this together. Ironically, I found your concise and frank little written synopsis at each step the most interesting part.

> I'm sure there's a plaintext essay that can explain this just as well if the RCT style was distracting.

Not distracting, just felt like a missed opportunity. A factory simulation that you could watch the different ingredients come in and travel through different building would have been neat.

I had the same feeling. I think it would click more if the cart visibly changed after each station — add a layer, change color, get cut into dies, etc.

Then the animation would be doing some of the explaining instead of mostly being scenery.

I added just that! Thanks for the feedback!

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