Knowledge Base

Atom

The smallest piece of any material. Everything you can touch — your skin, water, metal, air — is made of atoms. They’re so small that a million of them side by side is thinner than a human hair.

Think of atoms like LEGO bricks. Everything in the universe is built from different combinations of about 118 types of LEGO bricks.

Electron

A tiny particle that orbits around every atom, like a moon orbiting a planet. Electrons carry electricity. When electrons move through a wire, that’s what we call “electrical current.”

Imagine a marble spinning around a basketball. The basketball is the center of the atom; the marble is the electron. Make the marble move from one basketball to the next and you’ve got electricity.

Photon

The smallest possible piece of light. You can’t have half a photon. Light is made of photons the same way a river is made of water drops. Photons move at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) and carry energy.

A photon is a bullet of light. It’s the tiniest amount of light that can exist. Every lightbulb, every star, every screen you look at is shooting photons at your eyes.

Why this matters here: The chips on this site use photons instead of electrons to do math. Photons are faster and waste less energy.

Silicon

A chemical element. It’s what sand is made of. When purified and shaped into a perfect crystal, silicon becomes the material that almost every computer chip in the world is built on.

Silicon is the “paper” that circuits are drawn on. Just like you need paper before you can write a letter, you need silicon before you can make a chip.

Computer Chip (Processor)

A flat square of silicon (usually the size of a fingernail) with billions of tiny switches etched into it. These switches flip on and off to do math. Every phone, laptop, car, TV, and microwave has at least one.

A chip is a city of switches. Each switch can be ON or OFF (1 or 0). Arrange billions of them in the right pattern and they can solve any math problem — which means they can do anything, because everything a computer does is math underneath.

LED (Light Emitting Diode)

A tiny device that makes light when electricity flows through it. The lights in your phone screen, your TV, your car headlights — those are all LEDs. “Diode” means it only lets energy flow in one direction, like a one-way street.

An LED is a tiny lightbulb that never burns out and barely uses any power. In these chips, they’re shrunk down to smaller than a virus.

Wavelength

What determines the color of light. Red light has a long wavelength. Blue light has a short wavelength. It’s like the distance between ripples in a pond — wide ripples = red, tight ripples = blue.

Imagine a jump rope. Swing it slowly: big, lazy waves (red). Swing it fast: tight, rapid waves (blue/violet). Every color is a different “swing speed” of light.

Why this matters here: These chips use different wavelengths (colors) to do different types of math. Red does addition. Yellow does multiplication. Green does division.

Energy

The ability to make things happen. Heat is energy. Light is energy. Movement is energy. Electricity is energy in a form we can send through wires. Without energy, nothing moves, nothing works, nothing happens.

Energy is like water behind a dam. The water (energy) is just sitting there until you let it through the dam (a wire, a circuit, a machine), and then it does work on the other side.

Quantum

A word that means “a specific, fixed amount.” At the atomic scale, energy doesn’t flow smoothly — it comes in discrete chunks, like coins instead of liquid. Quantum physics is the rules for how very small things (atoms, photons, electrons) behave.

You can walk up a ramp (smooth). But you can’t walk up a staircase smoothly — you have to go one step at a time. Atoms and photons live in a staircase universe. Each step is a “quantum.”

Patent

A legal document from the government that says “this person invented this thing, and no one else can make it without their permission.” It lasts 20 years. If someone copies your patented invention, you can sue them.

A patent is a fence around an idea. You planted it, you grew it, you get to harvest it. The government put up the fence to make sure your neighbors don’t steal your tomatoes.

Operation

One math step. Adding 2+2 is one operation. Multiplying 7×8 is one operation. When we say a chip does “2.1 billion operations per second,” we mean it solves 2.1 billion individual math problems every second.

GOPS (Giga Operations Per Second)

“Giga” means one billion. So GOPS = billion operations per second. The measured baseline of these chips is 2.1 GOPS — two billion, one hundred million math problems per second.

Ronna & Quetta

The two biggest named numbers in the metric system (adopted in 2022). Ronna = 10²⁷ (a 1 followed by 27 zeros). Quetta = 10³⁰ (a 1 followed by 30 zeros). There is no named number bigger than Quetta.

If GOPS (billion) is a puddle, Quetta is every ocean on Earth, times every ocean on Earth, times every ocean on Earth again. It’s not just “a lot more.” It’s incomprehensibly more.

Byte

A unit of digital information. One byte stores one letter (like “A”). A photo is about 3 million bytes. A movie is about 4 billion bytes. “400 GB/s” means 400 billion bytes moved per second.

PCIe (PCI Express)

A standard slot (connector) inside computers that expansion cards plug into. Graphics cards, network cards, and storage drives all use PCIe. PCIe 5.0 is the current generation; PCIe 6.0 is just arriving. These chips use PCIe 5.0, meaning they plug into standard hardware.

PCIe is a doorway. The slot in the computer is the doorframe; the chip card is the door. PCIe 5.0 means the doorway is wide enough for the latest standard.

Circuit Board (PCB)

The flat green (or blue, or red) board inside electronics. Copper lines printed on it connect chips to each other and to power. It’s the highway system of electronics.

Latency

How long you have to wait for a response. Low latency = fast response. “400 nanosecond latency” means the chip responds in 400 billionths of a second — faster than a nerve signal travels down your arm.

Bandwidth

How much data can move at once. Think of a highway: latency is how fast each car goes; bandwidth is how many lanes the highway has. “400 GB/s bandwidth” = a 400-billion-byte-per-second highway.

Foundry

A factory that manufactures computer chips. You give them your design files; they turn them into physical chips. The biggest foundries: TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea), Intel (USA). “Foundry-ready” means the design can be sent to a factory right now.

GDSII

The file format that chip factories accept. Every chip in the world is delivered to the factory as a GDSII file. It describes the exact shapes that will be printed onto silicon. Think of it as a very precise blueprint.

Quantum Dot

A tiny crystal of semiconductor material, just 3–10 nanometers across (about 10–30 atoms wide). At this size, quantum physics rules apply. The dot can trap a photon and hold its energy, like a microscopic battery.

A quantum dot is a bucket so small it can only hold one drop of water at a time. But that one drop vibrates with a specific energy that you can read and use.

Nanometer (nm)

One billionth of a meter. For comparison: a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. A virus is about 100 nm. The structures in these chips are 3–10 nm — smaller than a virus.

Electromagnetic Field

An invisible force field created when electricity and magnetism work together. Radio waves, visible light, X-rays, and microwaves are all electromagnetic. These chips use electromagnetic fields to cool themselves without fans or liquid.

E = hf

Einstein’s formula for photon energy. E (energy) equals h (Planck’s constant, a fixed number) times f (frequency, which determines color). Translation: the color of light tells you exactly how much energy it carries. Bluer = more energy. Redder = less.

Superposition

A quantum physics trick where a particle exists in multiple states at the same time — until you look at it, and then it picks one. The chips use this: a quantum dot can be “charged” and “not charged” simultaneously, which lets it do two calculations at once.

Flip a coin and catch it in your hand without looking. Right now, before you peek, it’s both heads AND tails. That’s superposition. Open your hand and it picks one.

Coherence

How long a quantum state survives before the outside world disturbs it. Longer coherence = more time for the quantum dot to do useful work before it “forgets” what it was doing.

Coherence is how long you can keep a soap bubble alive before it pops. These chips are designed so the “bubble” lasts longer than the calculation takes.

License

Permission to use someone else’s invention. When these chips are sold, you’re not buying a physical chip — you’re buying the right to manufacture the chip in your own factory, under your own brand, as many as you want.

Buying a license is like buying a restaurant franchise. You get the recipe, the brand, the training manual. Then YOU build the restaurant and serve the food. The inventor gets paid for the recipe.

Non-Exclusive License

“Non-exclusive” means multiple companies can buy the same license. Company A buys it, Company B buys it — they both manufacture. Nobody gets a monopoly.

RTL (Register-Transfer Level)

The source code of a chip. Like how software has source code (the original text a programmer writes), hardware has RTL — the original description of how the chip works, written in a hardware programming language. It’s what gets turned into GDSII.

IP (Intellectual Property)

Ideas that have legal ownership. Patents, designs, formulas, trade secrets. When someone says “this IP is for sale,” they mean “you can buy the right to use these ideas.”

Deposition (in this context)

A formally recorded mathematical formula. Not the legal kind (testimony under oath) — here it means a formula that has been written down, numbered, named, and registered in a master list. There are 1,755 of them.

Metric Prefixes (from small to big)

Nano = one billionth (0.000000001)
Micro = one millionth (0.000001)
Milli = one thousandth (0.001)
Kilo = one thousand (1,000)
Mega = one million (1,000,000)
Giga = one billion (1,000,000,000)
Tera = one trillion (10¹²)
Peta = 10¹⁵
Exa = 10¹⁸
Zetta = 10²¹
Yotta = 10²⁴
Ronna = 10²⁷
Quetta = 10³⁰ (the biggest)

W/m-K (Watts per meter-Kelvin)

A measure of how well a material conducts heat. Higher = better at spreading heat around. Copper is ~400 W/m-K. Regular chip substrates are ~40 W/m-K. The special substrate in these chips is 400 W/m-K — as good as copper at moving heat away.

GT/s (Gigatransfers per second)

How many data transfers happen per second, in billions. “25.6 GT/s” means 25.6 billion data handoffs every second on each connection lane.