ChipTycoon: How a Computer Chip Is Made

Stops seen0 / 20

Layer1 of 4

Wafer#1

Read more

Stop 1 of 20

Sand Pit

Pinned to this stop.<br>Follow the cart again

The whole route click any stop to ride there

What you are watching

The yellow cart carries one wafer. Its cargo changes at every stop:<br>sand, then rough silicon, then a silver crystal, then a mirror-flat disc, and finally<br>a tray of chips. The middle of the park is a ring, because printing a chip means<br>driving the same six buildings about sixty times, once per layer.

What this is

ChipTycoon is a working chip factory laid out as a theme park. A cart carries one<br>silicon wafer along the roads and stops at each of the twenty buildings that turn<br>ordinary sand into a computer chip. The cargo on the cart is the wafer itself, and it<br>visibly changes at every stop, so you can always see what stage the material is at.

Why the middle is a ring

Making a chip is not carving or assembling. It is printing. A pattern is photographed<br>onto the wafer with light, carved into a solid layer, and then the whole thing happens<br>again for the next layer up. A real chip is about sixty of those layers stacked on top<br>of each other, which is why the cart drives the same six buildings round and round.<br>The park shows four laps and then moves on, so you are not sat there for an hour.

Pacing

The first time the cart reaches a stop it waits long enough for you to read that<br>stop's explanation, between 10 and 22 seconds depending on how much there is to say,<br>and a bar under the panel text shows how long is left. Once every stop has been<br>explained there is nothing new to read, so the park speeds up to a watchable pace. The guided first pass takes about eight minutes.<br>Space holds any stop for as long as you like, S skips to the next one, and<br>the speed slider scales everything, reading stops included.

Controls

Space play or pause · S next stop · R restart the tour ·<br>F follow camera · L signs

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, double-click to see the whole park.

Click any building for its explanation, or pick a stop from the list in the guide<br>to ride straight there.

How accurate is it

The order of the stages, and what each one physically does, is real: quartz sand,<br>carbon reduction, the Siemens purification, Czochralski crystal growth, wire sawing,<br>polishing, mask making, deposition, photoresist, exposure, develop and etch, ion<br>implantation, copper damascene wiring, wafer probe, dicing, packaging and final sort.<br>The numbers quoted are typical rather than exact, since they vary enormously between<br>products. Scaled down for the sake of the ride: four laps instead of about sixty, one<br>wafer instead of a lot moving in parallel, and a park you can walk across in a minute<br>instead of a building the size of several football pitches.

No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen<br>is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas.