PRÀCTIQUES ALS LABORATORIS DE FÍSICA DE LA UB

Els alumnes del 2n de Batxillerat Científic van assistir als tallers de pràctiques de Fisica a la Facultat de Física de la Universitat de Barcelona (UB): holografia, física de l’atmosfera, magnetisme, energies renovables…

L'alumne Enric Serra ens comparteix les seves reflexions en anglès.

A while ago, to my embarrassment, I learnt how an electronic circuit is actually made.

You might know those fancy, scientifically looking, green boards that appear in many TV series or expensive Hollywood productions that lay inside computers. Well so that’s nothing more than a handful of cables that are “compressed” in a board.

First of all the design of every cable, every capacitor and every resistor is made in a computer. Then you get a board with a thin copper layer on it and get the all copper out less the one in the places which is meant to be a “wire”. Then the  circuitry is placed and welded and that’s it.

Thing is that as those connections don’t carry tons of intensity they don’t need to be big fat wires, they are indeed astoundingly thin. That’s because they just need to carry tiny pulses of electric potential: whether a 1 or a 0. That’s it. The truly computational stuff is the black pieces that are welded into the circuitry which contain processors and the stuff that makes the machine think and compute (that’s why it’s a «bloody» computer!)

The green parts are a protector that preserves the copper and prevents it from oxidation because the copper is indeed a very oxygen friendly metal so it blends with the tiny oxygen that floats in the air. In normal conditions this is not important because the oxide of copper makes a thin layer that even protects the core of the material. But this time there is not an outer layer for it to protect the core, so a protective layer is heavily needed.

And as long as these thin layers of copper can be thinner computers will become smaller and smaller until we reach the quantum level.