Ergo, the TL;DR :) Even so, I oversimplified things a lot (a lot of the processes to leverage the silicon wafer, but some don't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wik

Ergo, the TL;DR :) Even so, I oversimplified things a lot (a lot of the processes to leverage the silicon wafer, but some don't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_insulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_insulator One of the things to keep in mind is that a silicon wafer starts with a near-perfect silicon ingot crystal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon The level of purity and perfection there is a little bit crazy to conceive. It's also worth noting how insanely tiny devices are. A virus is ≈100nm. DNA is 2nm diameter. We're at << 10nm for a device. That's really quite close to atomic-scale. There are something like ≈100 billion transistors per IC for something like a high-end GPU, and a single failed transistor can destroy that fancy GPU. That's literally just a few atoms out-of-place or a few atoms of some pollutant. The level of perfection needed is insane, and the processes which go into that are equally insane. We are making things on glass, but the glass has to be nearly perfect glass.