Overkill

absurdly advanced tech, explained badly, used for dumb stuff

All overkills

Chips

or: wizard sand that mostly does email

We dig up quartz, cook it into silicon that’s 99.9999999% pure1, grow it into one giant flawless crystal, and slice it into wafers. Then we fire a laser at droplets of molten tin 50,000 times a second, turning each one into a plasma around 500,000 degrees, way hotter than the surface of the sun2, to make light so extreme that even air swallows it. We bounce that light off mirrors so smooth that if one were the size of Germany, its tallest mountain would be a tenth of a millimeter tall3, and use it to print billions of switches, each smaller than most viruses4, onto a chip the size of your fingernail.

And we mostly use it to reply “per my last email.”

How it works, badly

  1. #
    basically sand,but way cleaner99.9999999%
    We cook rock into silicon that’s 99.9999999% pure.
  2. #
    tinpew× 50,000per secondhotter than the sun
    Then we laser molten tin 50,000 times a second.
  3. #
    if this mirrorwere Germany,its tallest bumpwould be 0.1 mm
    The light bounces off absurdly smooth mirrors and prints tiny switches.
  4. #
    “per my last email,”(typed on a miracle)
    Then we use it to answer email.

Wait, is that real?

Yes, and the mirror part is somehow the least exaggerated.

The wizard sand↩

Chips start as quartz, which is silicon bonded to oxygen. Refineries strip out the oxygen and nearly everything else until the silicon is at least 99.9999999% pure, called “nine nines.” That silicon is melted and slowly pulled into a single flawless crystal, then sliced into wafers that, for leading chips, are 300 millimeters across.

The tin light show↩

The most advanced chips are printed with extreme ultraviolet light, which has a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers. To make it, ASML’s machines shoot droplets of molten tin at about 70 meters per second and hit each one with two laser pulses: one flattens it, the next vaporizes it into a plasma of about 500,000 kelvin, which glows in EUV. This happens 50,000 times a second. All matter absorbs EUV, air and glass included, so the whole path runs in a vacuum and uses mirrors instead of lenses.

The mirrors↩

ZEISS makes those mirrors. Scaled up to the size of Germany, the country’s tallest mountain, the Zugspitze, would be about 0.1 millimeters high on it. ZEISS says the optics are precise enough to aim a laser at a ping pong ball on the Moon.

The switches↩

Each switch is a transistor. Apple’s A17 Pro phone chip holds 19 billion of them; the M3 Max laptop chip holds 92 billion.

The fine print↩

“Nine nines” is the floor; the purest silicon goes further. The plasma is about 500,000 kelvin, which at that scale is basically the same number in Celsius; the sun’s surface is around 5,800. “3 nanometer” chips don’t have 3-nanometer parts; it’s a marketing name, and real transistor features are tens of nanometers, which is smaller than most viruses but not all. Only the trickiest layers of a chip, often 5 to 25 of them, use EUV; older machines print the rest. And chips obviously do more than email; they also do spreadsheets about email.

Sources: ASML: the hottest thing about our machines; ZEISS: EUV optics; WikiChip: electronic-grade silicon; Wikipedia: extreme ultraviolet lithography; Wikipedia: Apple A17; Wikipedia: Apple M3

Last fact-checked .