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

jameshart•about 1 hour ago

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.

j_walter•29 minutes ago

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.

dyingkneepad•about 1 hour ago

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).

puchatek•about 1 hour ago

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

HelloUsername•21 minutes ago

"I want to get off of this cart."

washadjeffmad•about 1 hour ago

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.

kxjwidjwjdj•about 1 hour ago

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

laurentiurad•7 days ago

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.

mcphage•about 1 hour ago

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.

chrisjj•about 2 hours ago

Nice idea, but ...

> reading stop · press Space to hold it here

... what 'Space'? On phone.

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

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