From sand to AI chip
An Nvidia AI chip starts as sand. It takes about 3 months, hundreds of steps and companies from at least five countries to finish one.
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I 路 Setup: sand is purified into silicon that is 99.999999999% pure, melted, and grown into one giant crystal by slowly pulling a seed out of the melt. Shin-Etsu and SUMCO make most of the world's wafers. II 路 Rise: the crystal is sliced into mirror-polished wafers. Nvidia draws the design. Inside ASML's machine, a TRUMPF laser hits 50,000 tin drops a second; the flash makes EUV light just 13.5 nm wide, bounced off ZEISS mirrors to print the pattern. Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA deposit, etch and inspect, layer after layer. III 路 Turn: how small? About 1,500 transistor gates fit across one human hair. An Nvidia B200 has 208 billion transistors on two dies, made by TSMC. IV 路 Resolution: TSMC packages the dies with SK hynix memory. One chip, all of them.
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