ChipTycoon: a browser theme park that rides one wafer through chip fabrication

ChipTycoon is a single-page animation that reframes semiconductor manufacturing as a RollerCoaster Tycoon-style theme park. A cart hauls one silicon wafer down the roads of a 20-building factory, pausing at each station while the wafer visibly transforms — sand to purified crystal to finished die. Its central conceit is that chipmaking is printing, not carving: light projects a pattern through a photomask onto the wafer, that layer is etched in, and the process repeats. Real chips stack roughly 60 such layers, so the cart loops the same six buildings; the park runs four laps instead of sixty to keep the ride watchable.

The guided first pass takes about eight minutes, with each stop holding 10–22 seconds for reading before the park speeds up once every explanation has been shown. Keyboard controls let you pause, skip, follow the camera, or jump to any stage, and clicking a building pulls up its explanation. The stage order and physics are faithful — quartz sand, carbon reduction, Siemens purification, Czochralski growth, sawing, polishing, mask making, deposition, photoresist, exposure, etch, ion implantation, copper damascene wiring, probe, dicing, packaging, and final sort — while the quoted numbers are typical rather than product-exact.

The project’s appeal is as much technical as pedagogical: it ships with no build step, no dependencies, and no network calls, drawing every shape as plain polygons on an HTML canvas. That makes it a compact, self-contained explainer of a process usually hidden inside fabs the size of several football fields, and a neat demonstration of how much can be conveyed with vanilla web primitives.