ChipTycoon: watch how chips are made, SimCity style

Per Adafruit, a creative project called ChipTycoon transforms chip manufacturing into an interactive theme park. Creator Laurentiu Raducu designed it so a cart carries a single silicon wafer through twenty buildings representing each real stage of chip production. You watch the wafer visibly change at every stop, from quartz sand through purification, crystal growth, photolithography, etching, wiring, and on to a finished chip. On the first pass, each station pauses ten to twenty-two seconds for an explanation, then speeds up once you've seen the full tour. Every stage—Siemens purification, Czochralski crystal growth, ion implantation, damascene wiring, and the rest—follows the authentic manufacturing sequence. After packaging and delivery to the data center, the lorry loops back and the whole cycle begins again.

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