Kakageldi Gurbandurdyyev · Portfolio 2026
- Design Engineer
- Frontend Developer
- Interaction Designer
- Tool Builder
KakageldiGurbandurdyyev
I design and build interactive tools — calculators you can poke, circuits you can watch, lessons you can play with — that make hard ideas easy to see.
building things that make hard ideas click
10 steps
How a microprocessor is made
From sand to silicon, printed with High-NA EUV light.
Growing the crystal
A seed crystal is pulled from 1,414 °C molten silicon.
Quartz sand is refined into polysilicon so pure that only about one atom in a billion is anything else. It is melted in a quartz crucible, and a seed crystal is dipped in and slowly pulled out while it turns. The melt freezes onto it in one perfect crystal lattice, an ingot as tall as a person.
Slicing the wafers
A diamond wire slices the ingot into mirror-polished wafers.
A diamond wire saw cuts the ingot into thin discs. Each disc is lapped, etched and chemically-mechanically polished until the surface is flat to within a few atoms. The mirror-finish wafer is the canvas that every later step prints on.
Growing thin films
Films only a few atoms thick are grown and deposited.
In furnaces at about 1,000 °C the surface oxidises into glassy silicon dioxide. Chemical vapour deposition and atomic layer deposition then stack further films one gas pulse at a time. These are the insulators, gates and hard masks the pattern will be cut into.
Coating the photoresist
Photoresist is spun out into a film about 30 nm thick.
A few drops of light-sensitive photoresist land in the middle of the wafer, which then spins at thousands of rpm. Centrifugal force spreads the resist into a film only tens of nanometres thick, even from edge to edge. A gentle bake then drives out the solvent.
Exposing with High-NA EUV
13.5 nm EUV light prints the circuit, down to 8 nm.
A CO₂ laser strikes 50,000 droplets of molten tin every second. The plasma that results emits 13.5 nm extreme-ultraviolet light, and optics image the circuit on the mask onto the resist. High-NA scanners open the numerical aperture from 0.33 to 0.55 to print features only 8 nm across. The diagram is simplified: EUV is absorbed by glass and air, so every real element is a mirror in vacuum.
Perfecting the wavefront
The optics are tuned until the wavefront is flawless.
Any tiny error in the optics distorts the light's wavefront and blurs the print. Each element's error is measured as a map, and actuators then bend and shift the elements to cancel it. Computational lithography also pre-distorts the mask so the image lands exactly as designed.
Developing and etching
A plasma carves the printed pattern into the wafer.
A developer washes away the exposed resist and leaves a stencil of the circuit. A plasma of reactive ions, accelerated straight down, carves that stencil into the film below with near-vertical walls. The leftover resist is then stripped away.
Doping with ion implantation
Ions are fired into the silicon to form transistors.
Ions of boron, phosphorus or arsenic are fired into the exposed silicon to tune how it conducts, which forms each transistor's source and drain. A flash anneal lasting milliseconds heals the crystal and switches the dopants on.
Wiring the layers
Copper wiring is stacked up in 15 or more layers.
Billions of transistors are wired together by a stack of copper lines and vias. Each level is patterned and filled with copper, then polished flat. The whole coat, expose and etch loop repeats for every layer, each one aligned to the last to within a few nanometres.
Testing and packaging
Each die is tested, cut out and packaged.
Needle-fine probes test every die while it is still on the wafer. The wafer is then diced, and each good die is flipped onto a package substrate and capped with a heat spreader. About three months after it started as a bare wafer, it is a microprocessor.
projects built and shipped — tools for learning, and a few things that just needed to exist.
Approach
Good software should feel like a place worth spending time in: fast, clear, and a little bit playful.