Comment by kccqzy
5 years ago
> One thing I gained an appreciation for was how CHEAP cars and engines are. There's probably nothing else with as precise machining that is as inexpensive.
Not to denigrate the amount of engineering that went into car engines, but literally, what about chips? Devices that contain billions of transistors, arranged precisely on the order of nanometers. Yet they cost only hundreds of dollars.
They're apples and oranges. Chips are not machined, they're etched in batches. Their "tolerances", so to speak, are limited by the wavelengths of visible or UV light they use for creating the masks and exposing the photoresist that protects the wafer from hydrofluoric acid and other etchants. There's no mechanical force involved, except to spin wafers to apply coatings and move them between each stage of the process.
Engine blocks, on the other hand, are CNC machined one at a time and the force of machining steel causes vibrations that move the cutting tools thousands of nanometers back and forth. Placing both in the same building, for example, would likely cripple the semiconductor fab. Having a machine shop in China make a one off would likely cost as much as a luxury car.
Yes you are referring to another insanely complex thing that is very cheap relative to making one of cost due to mass production. But it isn't machined metal :) I didn't say I don't appreciate electronics too.