Silicon Boule Production Amazing

Schematic of Silicon Boule Furnace

Imagine a large single crystal silicon rod weighing 300+ kg of which many hundreds of wafers will be cut in order to make a base material onto which photolithography stages will create billions of transistors connected by tends of km of wiring connections via more than 120 different photo electro chemical processing stages inside cleanrooms in Chip Fabs, the most expensive buildings & operations on earth producing the most complicated products known to mankind! 

I have been a shareholder of Intel for more than 20 years & have a fanatical levels of interest in IC manufacturing. The idea of using UV light with special optical masks somewhat like photo printing from film, makes me look back on my high school photography class dark room experiences with B&W Fuji film exposed inside a 35mm Canon AE1 analog SLI camera with chemical film, that my dad purchased from a pawnshop when I was 16 since he had the same model! 

Chemical Film Cameras 

Film cameras with high quality ISO100 speed film produce a special imaging that digital just does not match, kind of the way that a tube amp produce a warm sound, the film produces a color depth & dynamic range that only the finest & super expensive digital cameras can simulate well, nothing within my budget as a working class soon to be School Bus Driver in training :) 

Photo Printing Integrated Circuits with UV Light

The glass or lenses alone for a Canon or Nikon camera can cost many times more than the camera. A heavy kit too, full 35mm lenses weigh more than the camera, some of the telephoto models looking more like a telescope than a camera lens, often used to captures sports action or for deep zoom sharp photography of nature. Actually Canon makes photolithography equipment available at half the cost of similar units from AMSL, as does Nikon & Fuji Heavy, but these systems are not a good or as cutting edge as the latest EUV gear from AMSL. 

Integrated Circuit Excellence

Integrated circuits like the SOC in your smartphone are made with hundreds of 46 megapixel images projected using UVC light onto more than 100 different masked exposure layers of silicon, into which metal ions are laid to make copper interconnects in the latest good IC making equipment, to create transistors by the billion in tiny areas the size of a human fingernail, that have the most complex logic assemblies made. Some government sized imaging sensors take up even larger areas of the wafer & larger area chips cost a lot since in individual finished 300mm wafer passed through 126 stages by Intel or TSMC can cost $200,000 or more. Some ultra large mixed signal chipsets used in defense & aerospace are often made RAD HARD or hardened for space radiation & contain combined analog & digital processing cores or systems on a chip that apply highly advanced artificial intelligence or signal processing & or signal intelligence or multi-spectral imaging & synthetic aperture radar or large format IR micro-bolometer sensor arrays, for use in drones & satellites & specialized tooling like the little Seek Thermal dongle I plug into my iPhones lighting jack to use with the associated app to make a Thermal Imaging solution :)

Thermal Imaging Sensors

A microbolometer a special type of bolometer use as a detector in a thermal camera. As infrared radiation with wavelengths between 7.5-14 micrometers strikes the detector elements, heating them & thus changing their electrical resistance, which an ISP processes into a colorized image like the one of our cat below. Special amongst thermal imaging solutions the microbolometer does not require active cooling, something Seek Thermal utilized in their smartphone IR imaging dongles. 

Seek Thermal Image of Sweet Pea our Kitty 
Seek Thermal Dongle into 2020 iPhone SE 

Looking at the current state of the art mobile SOC or system on a chip integrated circuits we find Apple's flagship A15 utilized in the mainboard logic boards of the iPhone 13 lineup & latest iPad mini 

Apple A15 made by TSMC on 5nm EUV processing node technology / bleeding edge IC technology 

iPhone SOC by Apple & TSMC Amazing 

Apples A15 has the highest data throughput per watt of electrical energy; most powerful neural AI engine of any mobile chip; fastest GPU of any mobile chipset, best ISP of any mobile chipset, smoothest display engine & imaging processing of any mobile chipset & more cache & faster memory support / its amazing what Apple & TSMC do together // something no other company on Earth able to do, design & produce the most advanced SOC in the world & apply it hundreds of millions of times in all the iPhone 13 models launching right now worldwide for sale to real world customers who will use them daily as their MVP of mobile electronics as a camera, phone, mobile internet & gaming platform, for navigation, accounting & bank access, for work login & for ride hailing & many other social media platforms & to stream content to watch or to access social media platforms like twitter or to shop on Ebay or Alibaba or Amazon & all at 5G speeds on the go, mobile gigabit data plans from wireless telecom giants like AT&T & Verizon, if your willing to pay that much per month. 

Information Jewelry 

Meg & I use mint mobile as its cheaper & works good enough for us, in our iPhone 12 mini & 2020 iPhone SE respectively) / she rolls a wifi only Apple Watch Series 5 & I roll with an Apple Watch SE // Invicta Grand Diver analog self winding automatic NH35A jeweled Japanese movement in a Swiss designed stainless steel case made in Malaysia by an American watch company based in Florida- all for only $100 USD 2021 from Amazon / the Apple Watch Series 5 was just under $400 out the door & the Apple Watch SE was just under $300 // by comparison // thats some serious gear hanging on our wrists, I also wear a copper bracelet on my right wrist in front of the Apple Watch SE // to bring copper oxide green ring ting to the skin on my wrist for its anti-inflammatory properties. 

Looking at the Big Data "Picture" 

Consider the scope of how information & data interact with electricity through the internet & information appliances & wearables connected online & how e-commerce growing & 5G emerging & IOT trending & self driving cars & more are becoming commercialized actively with more electric vehicles of all kinds that are powered by rechargeable batteries alone, charged from grid energy electricity made in one of 12 major ways, wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, fuel oil, coal, tidal, geothermal, wave, biomass, co-generation, waste heat recovery, pressure gradient energy recovery & electrochemical means. Think of all the society transformation effects of internet access & smartphone use & you can see some social skills being lost what access to information about nearly anything increasing for people connected online to other peoples minds & information about everything, like this blog posting & special thanks to you for reading it!