What's always blown me away is that chips are built up in layers. These layers are built up by lithography, which involves depositing an extremely thin sheet of

What's always blown me away is that chips are built up in layers. These layers are built up by lithography, which involves depositing an extremely thin sheet of material and then etching out the pattern for wires, etc. The etching requires accurately exposing a mask pattern on the layer. Each subsequent layer must perfectly align with the layer below, or the chip is dead. We're talking 1 to 2nm alignment (millionths of a mm) . So a 'printing head' must move accross the wafer stepping accross for each chip and land exactly over the previous layer. The stepping is extremely quick. So move 20cm and stop within 1nm, that's orders of mangintude in speed and accuracy. consistently. Jesus, how do they build these things!