Blog 1：From Silica Sand to Chips: How My Computer Parts Connect the World

Hello everyone! I‘m Yuanqing Wang, a student at McMaster University, and welcome to my first blog post! I love playing all kinds of games on my computer, which has given me experience in assembling computers. Just Thursday morning, I received a long-awaited package - it contained an AMD 9800X3D processor and an ASUS B650A motherboard. Opening the box, the motherboard surprised me. Although it is only 30x20 cm, it is filled with electronic parts from more than a dozen countries. In the corner it says "Made in China", but when I look closely with a magnifying glass, I see capacitors from Japan, power chips from Texas Instruments in the United States, and the AMD 9800X3D chip itself marked "Made in Malaysia". There is a global story behind this tiny chip.





A Processor's Journey Around the World

The starting point of silica sand – fire and ice in Norway

Every CPU starts with silica sand. The quartz needed for my 9800X3D probably comes from the fjords on the west coast of Norway, which is famous for its high-quality mines. The sand is sent to Germany, where factories melt it into single-crystal silicon rods, which are then cut into wafers.




Nano-scale "carving" - the miracle of Taiwan

The wafers are flown to TSMC's plant in Tainan, Taiwan. Here, EUV lithography machines from ASML in the Netherlands use nano-extreme ultraviolet light to carve AMD's 3D V-Cache design (created by their team in California) onto silicon wafers. The $180 million machine uses lenses from Zeiss in Germany.

Encapsulation across the equator – the assembly line in Malaysia

The engraved chips are sent to a packaging and testing factory in Malaysia. Workers wearing dust-proof suits mount the chips onto substrates and seal them with metal covers marked "AMD". So far, the CPU has flown 30,000 kilometers by air.

Shenzhen's "Ultimate Assembly."

The packaged processors are placed in anti-static bags and meet up with Asus motherboards in Shenzhen. The motherboard's PCB comes from Thailand, the Wi-Fi module comes from Vietnam, and the silver heat sink that fascinates me is probably made of aluminum from Australia.





The power of globalization

Technical strength and teamwork

The United States designed AMD's architecture, the Netherlands dominated the lithography machine, and Taiwan has top wafer fabs. But no country can make this CPU alone. As economist Richard Baldwin said, "In globalization 3.0, breaking the knowledge chain makes countries both powerful and fragile."

Balancing cost and speed

Norwegian silica sand + German refining + Taiwanese manufacturing + Southeast Asian assembly has greatly reduced costs. ASUS's logistics network can deliver motherboards from Shenzhen Port to Toronto in just 72 hours-1200 times faster than trade in the Middle Ages!




While assembling the computer, I kept thinking:

"What if TSMC stops production?" The chip shortage in 2021 once tripled the price of graphics cards.

"Where does all the electronic waste go?" Many African countries are full of old motherboards from developed countries.

But I can't ignore that globalization has allowed me to own a machine that can perform 24 billion calculations per second for $800-while 20 years ago, a supercomputer cost $200 million.


When I pressed the power button, the RGB lights inside the case lit up like the United Nations flag. The current flowing through the motherboard was a perfect symbol of globalization today:

Collaboration: This is a technology network built by seven countries and 2,000 companies.

Division: During the US-China trade war, Huawei's Kirin chips were also "locked" by a similar process.



So the next time you click your mouse, think about this:

“How many people's dreams and compromises are hidden in this machine?"

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