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  • Alteon@lemmy.world
    2·
    13 days ago

    Can someone explain these disc chips to me? Is it hundreds or thousands of individual chips that get cut from the disc and installed somewhere? Or is that disc the entire chip? It looks like the patterns repetitive so it makes me think it is a mass-produced small chip.

    Also, a follow-up, how are the chips actually cut from the desks? Are they laser cut? Punched out? Wire EDM? I would imagine that precision is absolutely crucial.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      I am not an expert, just some random dude.

      The wafers (“discs”) are indeed the “base” on which chips are “drawn”. So if you have a large chip (dGPU), you’ll be able to fit less of them on the wafer than say a simple ARM CPU. The wafers come in standard sizes. The foundries are trying to make rectangular wafers to better use more of the surface area (I have no clue why this is difficult, but it is).

      The chips are “drawn” via lithography machines (like lithograph art?). This is the hard part. I am not sure how they are cut out, but I don’t think this is the difficult part.