Chip Foundry

From sand to seven nanometres.

Chip Foundry is a semiconductor factory for Minecraft: a line of machines that turns quartz into packaged logic and memory chips, four large machines built from many blocks, a cleanroom you build yourself, and a ladder of five chip nodes where every step needs the chips of the one before. It is made for expert packs - the chips are parts to gate other recipes with - but it plays on its own, with a small generator for the first machines and room for any mod that makes Forge Energy.

The line

All machines work alike: two inputs, a slot for the mask, a slot for modules, a slot for a sound damper, six outputs, a tank in and a tank out. Pipes and hoppers fill and empty them from any side. The first line runs without a single pipe - a purifier standing on a water source draws from it and feeds the machines next to it.

Large machines

The plain Lithograph reaches down to 180 nm. For 45 nm and 7 nm you build the EUV Scanner: a machine of 45 blocks - casing, windows, two mirrors and a light source around a control block. While it works, a beam of violet light runs through it and a wafer travels under the beam; through the windows you can watch it.

The Crystal Tower is the second one: three by three and five high, with a heater coil under a glass column in which a glowing crystal grows. It pulls four boules in one go.

The Arc Smelter is the heavy one: a furnace of 36 blocks with three graphite electrodes in its lid that melts quartz by the stack.

The Packaging Line is the long one: six wide under a glass hood, with a dicing saw, a moving belt, two bond heads, a mold press and a tester. It packages four wafers a cycle and loses fewer dies to dust than the single machine.

Once such a machine stands complete, its blocks merge into one large machine - cooling fins, pipes, railings, a signal tower and all. Take a block out and the single blocks show themselves again.

Five nodes

The photomask of a node is made with chips of the node before it. It stays in the lithograph and lasts for 256 wafers.

Logic and memory. The same machines make two kinds of chips - the mask decides. Memory gives twice the chips per wafer (a stack of 64 at most) and is one and a half times as touchy. The ladders are woven together: a memory mask needs logic chips of its node, and the next logic mask needs both kinds. That makes ten rungs for a pack to gate recipes with.

The cleanroom

A box of up to 15 blocks inside, closed on all sides with cleanroom walls, windows, filter units and doors, and a controller in the hull. Sealed and powered, the room gets cleaner up to what its filters manage.

• Dust costs chips. A wafer exposed in dirty air is scrap, and dirty packaging loses dies. What fails goes back into the furnace.
• Two kinds of filters. Ordinary filter units stop at 90 %; fine filter units reach 100 %.
• Filter cartridges are used up by the filters - the more filters, the faster.
• You are the dirt. Every player inside without the full cleanroom suit costs the room 15 %. An open door costs more.
• Cleanroom ports are hull blocks that pipes and cables reach through; the energy port powers the room and hands the rest on to the machines inside.
• The airlock door closes by itself and never leaks. Light panels are hull blocks that light the room.
• Strip curtains are hull blocks you can walk through - no leak, but each costs the room 2 %.
• The controller's screen tells you what is wrong: the position of a gap, an open door, missing power, too few filters.

Running it big

• Three kinds of modules, up to four of one kind per machine: throughput (twice the runs each - sixteen at once), efficiency (a fifth less power each) and precision (a fifth less touchy about dust each).
• Sides, eject and intake: every machine has a panel for its six sides - Off, Input, Output or Both - and two switches that push finished pieces into the neighbour and pull in what fits. Large machines use every free face.
• Redstone: a signal holds a machine; comparators read how full a machine is and how clean a room is.
• A thousand machines cost about a millisecond of server time per tick.

Hardware, and Data Center

With the mod Data Center installed, a second line opens: you build that mod's hardware instead of buying it.

The Assembly Station builds 578 parts of Data Center: processors, graphics cards, mainboards, miners, memory modules, drives, power supplies and fans. The node follows the year a part really came out - 180 nm up to 2007, 45 nm up to 2017, 7 nm from 2018 - and the dearer the part, the more chips it takes.

Blueprints. Every product needs its blueprint in the station. Data Center's shop sells the blueprint - a manufacturer's licence - in place of the part; it stays in the station and is never used up. Needs Data Center 1.10.23 or newer.

Data Center is optional; without it this line and its recipes simply are not there.

Build the fab

Forty decoration blocks, in a creative tab of their own, for a factory that looks like one: cleanroom panels and ceilings with fan filter units, raised floors, facade panels and louvres, air ducts, water, gas and chemical pipes, cable trays, gas cabinets, chemical tanks, exhaust stacks, wafer pod shelves, lab tables, gowning benches and lockers, control desks, floor markings, warning lights and signs.

For pack makers

Every step is a datapack recipe (chipfoundry:processing): machine, ingredients, mask, fluids in and out, result, scrap, how touchy the step is, energy and time. Change them or add steps and nodes of your own with a datapack or KubeJS. What counts as hull, filter, suit and cartridge is decided by tags, and the size of rooms, the power of filters and the energy of all recipes by the config.

In the game

• JEI: a page per machine, with energy, time and the cleanliness a step needs.
• Jade: what a machine is doing and how clean its spot is.
• Patchouli: the Chip Foundry Handbook, crafted from a book and raw silicon.
• Sounds: every machine type has its own working loop, with a volume option - and a Sound Damper for the machine next to your desk.
• Advancements lead from the first silicon to the 7 nm chip. English and German.

All three are optional. Chip Foundry needs NeoForge 21.1.238 or newer. Its own Combustion Generator powers the first machines; beyond the first node you will want a real power plant from a mod that makes Forge Energy.

Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge. Works in singleplayer and on servers.

A note on how this was made

This mod was built with substantial help from AI - more than my other mods. I asked for a technical mod for my expert pack and gave the direction; the design, the code, the textures and this text were written by an AI assistant. I would rather say that plainly than have you wonder.

Discord

Questions, bug reports, ideas, or just want to show what you built? Join the Discord - that is where I answer fastest, and where the next version gets shaped.