Chips & Information
Lithography machines and dilution refrigerators, and the fibres, satellites and codes that carry information.
5 plates
Plates 5
- Plate 41 How a Phone Knows Where It Is InformationGoing further Thirty-odd satellites, 20,200 km up, keep announcing the time. A phone only listens, and from how late each announcement arrives it works out where it is, to within a few metres. Open →
- Plate 42 Light in a Glass Thread InformationStart here Shine a light into a stream of water and the light bends with the stream. Today the same trick traps the internet in glass threads as fine as a hair and sends it across the Pacific. Open →
- Plate 45 A Code That Survives Sand InformationStart here Bury part of a QR code in sand and a phone still reads it. The secret is in its spare bytes, which say nothing at all but can work out what went wrong and how to put it right. Open →
- Plate F01 EUV Lithography Machine ManufacturingGoing further Light 13.5 nm long prints a chip’s circuits on silicon, four times smaller than the mask. It comes from tin droplets turned to plasma, and travels only by mirrors. Open →
- Plate F05 The Dilution Refrigerator QuantumGoing further A superconducting quantum computer hangs from a gold-plated “chandelier”. Each stage is colder than the one above; the last is about 10 mK, hundreds of times colder than space. Open →