What is Microchip? What does a Microchip do? How is a Microchip Made?

If you have some interest in technology, you already know what microchips are and what they do. However, in this article, we will try to explain everything about microchips in the finest detail. In English, an integrated circuit, the monolithic integrated circuit is also called IC. Microchips, which are called an integrated circuit, chips, integrated circuit, or "Tümdevre" in Turkish, is an indispensable part of today's technologies.

The History Of Microchips

Tools that once performed simple operations on a gigantic scale have become portable in pockets thanks to today's technologies, while at the same time they have evolved enough to perform even the most complex operations in seconds. Undoubtedly, the biggest role in the shrinkage and development of technological devices is transistors and microchips. Transistors were developed by physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, who was working at Bell Laboratories in the USA in 1947. These first transistors were made of semiconductor materials and used a germanium crystal as the main material. The crystals in the transistors were placed in such a way that they could control a stronger current in the next circuit with the smallest electric current. These three scientists who developed the transistors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Transistors allowed the miniaturization of complex circuits because they were small, produced little heat, required little energy, and were quite safe. The transistors worked quite well, but they could have become more efficient. The parts inside the transistor were connected with the solder. In the 1950s, it was discovered that these parts could be molded on a plate. The first microchips were developed by two engineers, unaware of each other, towards the end of the 1950s. One of these engineers is Kilby, who was born in Kansas in 1923. He graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1947. He moved to Texas with his wife in 1958 and started working at Texas Instruments on the miniaturization of electronic parts. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. Another name who succeeded in developing a microchip is Robert Noyce. Robert Noyce, born in Iowa in 1927, while continuing his education at Grinnell College, showed his students two of the first transistors produced by his teacher, physics professor Grant Gale, produced at Bell Laboratories, and this event had a great impact on Noyce. When he completed his doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1953, Robert Noyce, who received job offers from famous companies such as IBM, RCA, and AT&T, preferred to work at Philco, which deals with transistors, despite these offers. Working here for three years, Noyce receives a job offer from William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, and moves to Silicon Valley with his family. Unable to get along with Shockley, Noyce founded Fairchild in 1957 with seven of his friends. Having achieved commercial success in the sales of transistors in a short time, Noyce continued his work in this direction in 1959, thinking of placing all resistors, capacitors, transistors, and other connections on a single silicon. Thus, six months after Kilby, Noyce succeeded in producing integrated circuits. The integrated circuit produced by Noyce using silicon is more practical than the circuit produced by Kilby using germanium. Thus, a large number of transistors on small silicon plates are molded together with the connections between them and started to be removed. This is how the integrated circuits used today, namely microchips, came into existence.

How Made Microchips?

Microchips, the product of super-electronic intelligence, invented 60 years ago, are capable of performing billions of calculations per second. But while that's good news for us, it's not so good news for the people who make them. To achieve this kind of processing power, microchip manufacturers must squeeze millions of components onto a plate the size of your fingertip. So how do they achieve this and how are microchips made?

Microchips work using millions of individual components called transistors. The more transistors you fit on the chip, the faster and more powerful the chip will be. Transistors are 200 times smaller than red blood cells. It is a big manufacturing problem to produce such a small thing, and the name of the tool that eliminates this problem is the photolithography machine. The photolithography machine can print trillions of transistors per hour on silicon wafers. Before entering the machine, each plate is coated with a photosensitive liquid layer. The machine works by sending a laser beam onto the transistor design and silicon layer. It leaves the image of the transistor on the plate, just like when taking a photo.

The number of transistors in the chips nearly doubles every two years. They achieve this by reducing the size of each transistor. Machines are made to reduce the size of transistors at the ASML factory, also in the Netherlands. However, when you deal with technology products as small as a transistor, a single grain of dust or leather that can be found in important parts of the machine can lead to disaster. For this reason, special protective clothing, gloves, and shoes are used in the factory. However, since even all these measures are not clean enough, each employee takes an air shower when entering the clean room. All of the air in the factory needs to be replaced with fresh and clean air every 2 minutes, making the inside ten thousand times cleaner than the outside.

So how are transistors reduced in size? In a country famous for its floods, it is not surprising to find the answer in the water again. They discovered that when they passed the laser through a layer of water, it acted as sunlight passing through a magnifying glass, increasing the sharpness of the light and reducing the size of each transistor to 5 times smaller than the smallest bacteria. The completed product will help produce smaller, faster, and more powerful microchips.