@tiffintech: How does sand become a computer chip? I mean, the same sand you find on a beach eventually powers your phone and even AI. It sounds wild, but here’s how that actually happens. It starts with silicon dioxide, basically sand but cleaned and refined until it’s 99.9999999% pure. That’s melted at over 1,400 degrees Celsius into a giant crystal called an ingot, then sliced thinner than paper into perfect, mirror-like wafers. And here’s where it gets really crazy. Light, yes, literal light, is used to print billions of transistors onto those wafers. Machines from ASML fire ultraviolet light so precise it can carve patterns just a few nanometers wide, smaller than a virus. Each transistor acts like a tiny on-off switch for electricity. Billions of them working together become the logic that powers every photo you take, every video you stream, every AI model running today. Then those wafers are cut into chips, tested, packaged, and end up inside everything from your phone to self-driving cars to massive AI data centers. So the next time you hear about a big AI breakthrough, remember it probably started as sand. #Tech #techexplained #stem #technology

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Wednesday 15 October 2025 21:00:31 GMT