Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#12This is pretty good...simplifies the process and some of the items are out of order, but it describes the process pretty well. Keep in mind, even 20 year old chips have 6-700 steps in their process...it's a giant loop of Etch, Photo, Implantation, Furnace, Chemical Vapor Deposition, Physical Vapor Deposition, Chemical Mechanical Planarization, etc...don't forget the measurement steps and defect scans. State of the ar…
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#13Nice website. One problem, though: the animation goes too fast for my reading speed, so I have to click stop. Then when I click on the next thing, I have to click stop again. Very annoying. If I click stop, just make it stay stopped until I click play again (which I won't).
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#14I created Chip Tycoon as an animated visualization of the semiconductor manufacturing process, inspired by the classic isometric style of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. Rather than reading through a long article, you can watch silicon move through the major manufacturing stages—from wafer fabrication and lithography to packaging and testing—in a miniature factory. My goal was to make one of the world's most com…
It's neat, but I'm not entirely sure what the animations contribute. What's neat about games like RollerCoaster Tycoon is watching this entire map full of things happening without needing to be controlled, but this doesn't really have that. There's your vehicle moving around, and there's people wandering around, but they're not doing anything. It doesn't feel like a factory of connected components.
The RCT style didn't really add anything other than showing it on a conveyor belt of sorts, but it was cute and in a world where HTML and CSS are practically free to make, we might as well spend some tokens on making educational content a bit more digestible.
I'm sure there's a plaintext essay that can explain this just as well if the RCT style was distracting.
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#15Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's neat, but I'm not entirely sure what the animations contribute. What's neat about games like RollerCoaster Tycoon is watching this entire map full of things happening without needing to be controlled, but this doesn't really have that. There's your vehicle moving around, and there's people wandering around, but they're not doing anything. It doesn't feel like a factory of connected components.
I thought it was cute. The RCT style didn't really add anything other than showing it on a conveyor belt of sorts, but it was cute and in a world where HTML and CSS are practically free to make, we might as well spend some tokens on making educational content a bit more digestible. I'm sure there's a plaintext essay that can explain this just as well if the RCT style was distracting.
Some feedback on the UI. Just knowing there was an automatic timer made me feel rushed while reading each expanded step (regardless of speed selected), so I tried to manually take over the navigation, by using the pause button, next step button, and tapping factories. This caused my conveyor cart to somehow become decoupled from the current step and felt kind of buggy.
I also felt trapped in the Loop, which went around 3 times. I didn't notice an exit button. Better yet, this is a transition where perhaps a swift animation of the cart going around a few times on its way to the next step may help communicate the sense of repetitiveness you're trying to make the user feel.
I was on mobile and I noticed by the end of the park my phone had gotten quite noticeably hot - which is unusual except when under heavy gaming load.
Thanks for putting this together. Ironically, I found your concise and frank little written synopsis at each step the most interesting part.
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#17Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#18Cute, but the steps don't make sense. E.g. each cycle shows both an ion gun and wire deposition. But only the first layer would use the ion gun, and only the following layers would have metal deposited. (Front End of Line vs Back End of Line). Not to mention the lack of diffusion and oxidation. The whole "loop" metaphor gives the wrong idea of what's happening.
All subtly wrong. And no, not in the 'simplified' sense.
Re: Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
#19At the end the truckload of chips should be happily on its way to a consumer electronics factory when it gets suddenly diverted along with all the others down a side road that dumps all the chips into the ravenous insatiable maw of the hyperscale datacenter industry.