The Craziest Highway Interchange You Can Imagine.

Today at the office I held one of the craziest highway interchanges you can imagine in my hand.

I met members of IBM’s global processor engineering teams, the people who design the logic inside the chips that power some of the world’s most important systems.

It begins with extraordinarily pure silicon, grown into a large cylindrical crystal called an ingot. That ingot is sliced into thin discs, which are polished until they become the incredibly smooth silicon wafers used to manufacture chips.

Through a long series of manufacturing steps, including photolithography, deposition, etching and doping, microscopic transistors are built across the wafer.

The repeating little squares you see covering it are called dies. Once separated and packaged, each functional processor die can ultimately become the CPU or the “brain” doing the computing.

One of the IBM engineers gave me the best description of what happens next: imagine “the craziest highway interchange you can imagine.”

Above the transistors are multiple microscopic layers of interconnect wiring, including incredibly tiny copper lines, routing electrical signals through the chip. Think of billions of tiny electronic switches with an extraordinarily complex, multilayer highway system connecting them, all packed into a piece of silicon you can hold between your fingers.

Once fabrication is complete, the wafer is tested and cut or diced into its individual dies, traditionally using a precision diamond saw. The usable dies are then packaged so they can receive power, communicate with the rest of the computer and ultimately become part of a working system.

So the shiny round object I was holding wasn’t one giant processor.

It was a silicon wafer containing many individual processor dies, each containing an almost incomprehensible amount of microscopic engineering.

The process is seemingly“magical” because of the scale and complexity involved.

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