I 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 complex manufacturing processes easier to understand by turning it into something that feels alive and enjoyable to watch.
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.
Nice 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).
I'll be honest, as someone who enjoys industrial food science, I felt a small pang of disappointment when I realized this was about integrated circuits.
At 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.
This 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 art chips take 3-4 months to complete this process and it's well over a thousand steps.
Cute, 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.
I think the chosen visualization detracts from learning rather than enhancing it. A simple, static flowchart would be more informative, easier to consume, and almost certainly less buggy and confusing to interact with.
Running a chip fab would actually make a pretty good Factorio-style automation game with perhaps puzzle elements inside the lithography device and in the tape out portion
Captain of Industry has a simple chain that requires looping to add all layers, so there is that. Anything more complicated and it will look more like Zachtronics game.
Did someone recently release a library (or skill.md [0]) for making these sorts of visualisations?
It looks strikingly like the LLM explainer someone posted a few days ago.
[0] I ask this bit in the "About" makes me wonder: "No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas."
FWIW, my comment may have come off as more dismissive than I meant--it's a cool approach. I'd just never seen a visualization quite that like and then ran into two in the same week.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 4.6 ms ] threadMy goal was to make one of the world's most complex manufacturing processes easier to understand by turning it into something that feels alive and enjoyable to watch.
> reading stop · press Space to hold it here
... what 'Space'? On phone.
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 art chips take 3-4 months to complete this process and it's well over a thousand steps.
https://youtu.be/zVq8o9mgugc?si=YouOXIbJEEsDJS4z&t=135
It looks strikingly like the LLM explainer someone posted a few days ago.
[0] I ask this bit in the "About" makes me wonder: "No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas."
FWIW, my comment may have come off as more dismissive than I meant--it's a cool approach. I'd just never seen a visualization quite that like and then ran into two in the same week.
BTW I created a skill in the end for this type of animations: https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel/learnscape