What this is

ChipTycoon is a working chip factory laid out as a theme park. A cart carries one silicon wafer along the roads and stops at each of the twenty buildings that turn ordinary sand into a computer chip. The cargo on the cart is the wafer itself, and it visibly changes at every stop, so you can always see what stage the material is at.

Why the middle is a ring

Making a chip is not carving or assembling. It is printing. A pattern is photographed onto the wafer with light, carved into a solid layer, and then the whole thing happens again for the next layer up. A real chip is about sixty of those layers stacked on top of each other, which is why the cart drives the same six buildings round and round. The park shows four laps and then moves on, so you are not sat there for an hour.

Pacing

The first time the cart reaches a stop it waits long enough for you to read that stop's explanation, between 10 and 22 seconds depending on how much there is to say, and a bar under the panel text shows how long is left. Once every stop has been explained there is nothing new to read, so the park speeds up to a watchable pace. The guided first pass takes about eight minutes. Space holds any stop for as long as you like, S skips to the next one, and the speed slider scales everything, reading stops included.

Controls

• Space play or pause · S next stop · R restart the tour · F follow camera · L signs
• Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, double-click to see the whole park.
• Click any building for its explanation, or pick a stop from the list in the guide to ride straight there.

How accurate is it

The order of the stages, and what each one physically does, is real: quartz sand, carbon reduction, the Siemens purification, Czochralski crystal growth, wire sawing, polishing, mask making, deposition, photoresist, exposure, develop and etch, ion implantation, copper damascene wiring, wafer probe, dicing, packaging and final sort. The numbers quoted are typical rather than exact, since they vary enormously between products. Scaled down for the sake of the ride: four laps instead of about sixty, one wafer instead of a lot moving in parallel, and a park you can walk across in a minute instead of a building the size of several football pitches.

No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas.