Lunch And Be taught: Pc Chips. At Kodiak we now have a weekly, elective… | by David Silver | Self-Driving Automobiles | Oct, 2022

At Kodiak we now have a weekly, elective assembly referred to as Lunch & Be taught, the place someone within the firm talks about one thing they know properly.

Often the subject is said to, however not strictly part of, Kodiak and autonomous trucking. And, often, the format is for the session chief to play a video and add some feedback. That’s quite a bit simpler than arising 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 trade.

We watched a sequence of movies, together with this video by TechAltar: “Why making chips is so exhausting.”

The video highlights 5 areas required for chips:

1. Instruction Set Structure
2. Chip Design
3. Fabrication
4. Gear & Software program
5. Packaging

Of these, fabrication looks like the toughest, as a result of large capital investments required for fabrication tools.

The entire video is nice and value a watch.

A bonus query someone requested in our session, that isn’t addressed by the video: why are silicon wafers spherical?

Reply: silicon ingots are shaped by the Czochralski technique, which principally includes melting an ingot and letting it unfold out from the middle. This leads to spherical wafers.