At Kodiak we’ve got a weekly, optionally available assembly referred to as Lunch & Study, the place anyone within the firm talks about one thing they know nicely.
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 quite a bit simpler than developing with an hour-long lecture from scratch.
This week, we discovered about silicon chips, together with why chips have been in brief provide in automotive business.
We watched a sequence of movies, together with this video by TechAltar: “Why making chips is so arduous.”
The video highlights 5 areas required for chips:
- Instruction Set Structure
- Chip Design
- Fabrication
- Gear & Software program
- Packaging
Of these, fabrication looks like the toughest, as a result of huge capital investments required for fabrication tools.
The entire video is nice and value a watch.
A bonus query anyone requested in our session, that’s not addressed by the video: why are silicon wafers spherical?
Reply: silicon ingots are fashioned by the Czochralski technique, which principally includes melting an ingot and letting it unfold out from the middle. This ends in spherical wafers.