At Kodiak we now have a weekly, elective assembly known as Lunch & Study, the place someone within the firm talks about one thing they know effectively.
Normally the subject is expounded to, however not strictly part of, Kodiak and autonomous trucking. And, normally, the format is for the session chief to play a video and add some feedback. That’s loads simpler than developing with an hour-long lecture from scratch.
This week, we realized about silicon chips, together with why chips have been in brief provide in automotive trade.
We watched a sequence of movies, together with this video by TechAltar: “Why making chips is so onerous.”
The video highlights 5 areas required for chips:
- Instruction Set Structure
- Chip Design
- Fabrication
- Tools & Software program
- Packaging
Of these, fabrication looks as if the toughest, as a result of large capital investments required for fabrication tools.
The entire video is nice and value a watch.
A bonus query someone requested in our session, that isn’t addressed by the video: why are silicon wafers spherical?
Reply: silicon ingots are fashioned by the Czochralski methodology, which principally entails melting an ingot and letting it unfold out from the middle. This ends in spherical wafers.