The world can’t stop talking about the chip, but the thrill is in the toppings. The toppings are the atomic-sized transistors, the fragments of supercharged pimentos and capers that, when carved, layered, and latticed into a semiconductive nano-universe, give a microchip its fathomless virtuosity. By contrast, the chip is just a crisp, visible morsel carved out of a silicon wafer.
The world can’t stop talking about the chip, but the thrill is in the toppings. The toppings are the atomic-sized transistors, the fragments of supercharged pimentos and capers that, when carved, layered, and latticed into a semiconductive nano-universe, give a microchip its fathomless virtuosity. By contrast, the chip is just a crisp, visible morsel carved out of a silicon wafer.
Admittedly, not just any silicon. Silicon wafers are the flattest objects in the world. The circular disks, between 6 inches and a foot in diameter, are shiny flat frisbees, half a millimeter thick, shimmering with rainbows like wide-stretched soap bubbles. Semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs, are known by the size of the wafers they process into chips. The bigger the wafer, the bigger the haul, so companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung and Intel pride themselves on having 12-inch fabs, the largest ones.
The surface of a perfectly polished silicon wafer cannot be felt. The skin on our salty fingertips is among the most sensitive in nature, after only crocodile and alligator faces, and the mechanoreceptors on the ends of our fingers respond to discontinuities as small as 13 nanometers. But a silicon wafer is polished free of all blemishes, including sub-nanometer ones. So, without transistors, the wafer feels like a featureless blank, even to such exquisite sensors as humans have. This supernatural smoothness is the starting point for a feat of engineering that involves quintillions of other objects that humans can’t perceive either by sight or touch or both.
So, how to manipulate surfaces with no texture and transistors a few atoms thick? The magnificent software in the fabs has the answer: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” as the English poet William Blake wrote. The doors of artificial intelligence’s perception have been cleansed, and it has been trained, among other things, to scan chips for defects that, to a human on Earth, would appear like a half-dollar on the moon. In the fabs, AI can see ultraviolet light and palpate the impalpable.
But let’s rewind the supply chain—disintegrate that smooth wafer for a minute and return its raw materials to the earth. To make a chip, you start with sand. Silica sand is quarried all over. It exists on our planet in an obscene surplus. In its natural state, it is dielectric, or insulating, but it can conduct electricity if rigged to do so—if, say, humans impurify it in a process known endearingly as doping. It’s versatile and controllable and thus excellent for humans looking to tyrannize over electrical currents.
You can see why Mark Liu, the chairman of the formidable TSMC, considers silicon a gift from God. After oxygen, silicon is the second-most common element on Earth. I’ve come to see it like this: Silicon is to the built world what oxygen is to the humans who built it. It’s the animator.
Silicon may be more scooped than mined, but the process of making wafers still entails the signature violence of humankind: “digging stuff up and burning it,” in the words of the environmentalist Bill McKibben. Quarried silica sand is heated in a crucible to some 2,000 degrees Celsius and, when molten, spun. A small seed crystal, separately grown, is then dipped into the hot brew and painstakingly withdrawn by a robot arm. This method of creating a salami-shaped ingot composed of a single crystal is named for its Polish inventor, Jan Czochralski, who in 1916 went to ink his fountain pen, missed the inkwell, and dipped the pen into molten tin. When he pulled the pen out, he got a metal rod.
So, a large crystal is formed when the robot pulls out the seed crystal. That part looks a bit like candy-making. The resulting single-crystal silicon ingots feature a Bravais lattice. What’s a Bravais lattice? Crystallography is tantalizingly complex, and Bravais even more so, so let’s just say the structure of the entire log of silicon is like that of a gemstone—continuous, unbroken to its edges, and free of any boundaries between crystals. No impurity or lacuna in the system can interfere with the flow of electrons. Electrons will flow only where humans tell them to, with transistors. The toppings.
Visitors view a screen showing a wafer at the TSMC Museum of Innovation in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on July 5. Sam YehAFP via Getty Images
We’ll get to those soon. A saw made of solid diamond slices wafers out of the ingot. Each freshly sliced wafer is then exfoliated with chemicals, including diamond liquid slurry—only the finest—to reduce all possible peaks, valleys, and damage. The whole disk lands in a lithography machine, and things get even more exquisite. We’re down to the atoms.
A photolithography machine carves with light, and it’s the litho that must be refined in order to keep the wheels of Moore’s law turning. A reminder: Moore’s law is not a law. It’s better understood as a guess, made by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, in 1965. Every year (or two)—or so the “law” goes—engineers will maybe, probably, double the number of transistors they can stuff onto a silicon chip. Remarkably, Moore’s hunch has held. Liu at TSMC told me that he considers Moore’s law “shared optimism.” It’s hope itself.
Lithography means the same thing in chipmaking as it does in printmaking. The process was invented in 1796 by the German playwright Alois Senefelder, who found he could copy scripts if he wrote them in grease on wet limestone and then rolled ink over the wax. As late as the 1960s, engineers still made chips by dropping wax onto metal and etching away at it. That worked to fit four or eight transistors on a chip, but as the number rose to millions, billions, and now trillions, the transistors became first more invisible than wax and then much, much smaller than invisible. Engineers needed something considerably more precise than wax: light. Light with a short, precise wavelength, way out past red and yellow, on to the right past blue, indigo, and violet, blasting out of the visible spectrum.
For the world’s most sophisticated chips, machines made by the Dutch firm ASML do 100 percent of the photolithography. This requires scanner metrology software that measures and compensates for the sub-nanometer flaws that creep in during production as the temperature and atmospheric pressure fluctuate. Machine learning tools speed up manufacturing by processing the terabytes of data thrown off by the metrology systems.
The next generation of ASML’s machines, each the size of a modest foyer, will cost around $400 million. They earn their keep. A company like TSMC gets its entire eye-popping valuation to the degree that it etches more and smaller transistors onto a silicon chip each year than do its rivals.
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The process of etching on materials a few atoms thick is a kind of transubstantiation. It turns sand into mind. A projector, its lens covered by a crystal plate inscribed with patterns made by chip designers, including the ones in Apple’s homeland of Cupertino, cranes over the wafer. Extreme ultraviolet light is beamed through the plate and onto the wafer, where it burns a design on each chip segment. Then the wafer is bathed in chemicals to etch along the pattern. This happens again and again until dozens of latticed layers are etched and printed. The wafer is then scored like a sheet of stamps so it can be divided into chips. Finally, the chips are punched out of the wafer. Each chip, with billions of transistors and wires stacked on it, amounts to an atomic multidimensional chessboard with billions (or even trillions) of squares. The potential combinations of ons and offs can only be considered endless.
There is some bad news. There had to be. The transistors on the microchip were, like Stanford University and the Third Reich, the brainchild of a eugenicist. In the 1940s, William Shockley, a physicist, oversaw research into semiconductors at Bell Labs. In 1956, he and two of his colleagues won a Nobel in physics for their discovery of the transistor effect—the way switches attached to semiconductive material could replace expensive and fragile vacuum tubes. Shockley went on to set up Fairchild Semiconductor. The members of the original Fairchild team have all become household names, including Moore and Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel. Noyce, not a eugenicist, is today considered the proper “father of the microchip.” But it should not be forgotten that the transistors, the toppings, are an inheritance from Shockley, who spent most of his life gibbering nonsensically about race, arguing for the sterilization of Black men and compulsively banking his sperm, which he considered racially pure and dense with IQ points.
Microchips abhor linearity. The switches go on and off and zig and zag in such a rococo way that it should not be surprising to find that these things have some immoral authors and can—in the form of, say, a hypersonic missile—be put to immoral uses. But if Shockley was a racist lunatic, the chairman of TSMC, which makes 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips, must be the most decent, humane, and accomplished scientist ever to run a global company.
“We are doing atomic constructions,” Liu told me last year, when I asked him about making microchips. “I tell my engineers, ‘Think like an atomic-sized person.’” He also cited a passage from the Book of Proverbs, the one sometimes used to ennoble mining: “It’s the glory of God to conceal matter. But to search out the matter is the glory of men.”
This article appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Foreign Policy. Subscribe now to support our journalism.
Virginia Heffernan is a journalist writing on tech policy and culture and the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.
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