How the Newest GPU & Quantum Chips Are Made
The most complex manufacturing on Earth, told from the beginning: how ordinary quartz sand becomes 99.9999999%-pure silicon, how a wafer is grown and sliced, how light prints circuits finer than a virus, what EUV machines do, how doping and etching sculpt billions of transistors, how FinFET and gate-all-around devices work, how a giant AI GPU is stitched together from chiplets and stacked memory — and how the radically different quantum processors at the frontier are fabricated.
Spruce Pine — the quartz that makes the world's chips
From Sand to Silicon
The cleanroom — cleaner than an operating theatre
Wafers & the Cleanroom
The stepper/scanner — printing with light
Printing Circuits with Light
EUV — the most complex machine ever built
EUV — Light From Exploding Tin
The p–n junction — where electronics began
Doping the Silicon
Copper interconnects — wiring a chip
Building in 3D
The 3D transistor revolution
The Modern Transistor
The AI accelerator — chiplets and stacked memory
Building a Giant AI GPU
The $20-billion fab
Yield, Testing & the Price of a Chip
The quantum processor — built near absolute zero
Fabricating Quantum Chips