License, terms and privacy

© 2026 Daniel Cummings. Unless a page says otherwise, the text, figures and exported GIFs (including GIFs of the simulations) on Chip Field Guide are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

• You may share and adapt the material, for example in a class, a slide deck, a study group or a social media post.
• Give credit: say where it came from and link to it, e.g. “Figure from chipfieldguide.com”, and say if you changed it. Don’t remove the watermark or credit from a figure or GIF.
• Not commercially: don’t sell the material or use it in a paid product, course or publication without written permission. Ask if you’re unsure; permission is often easy to give.

The license doesn’t cover the outside material listed under Credits, which keeps its own license. It also doesn’t cover the site’s source code (the software that builds and runs the site, as opposed to the content it shows), which is private: © 2026 Daniel Cummings, all rights reserved.

By using Chip Field Guide you agree to these terms.

• Education only. Chip Field Guide explains how chips are designed and built, for general learning. It is not professional engineering, legal, export-control, medical, safety, financial or investment advice. Don’t rely on it for decisions with real consequences without checking a qualified source.
• No warranty. The site is provided “as is”. It may contain mistakes or be out of date; facts about products are as of the dates shown with them. Simulations and figures are simplified models, and numbers marked illustrative are not measurements.
• Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, Daniel Cummings is not liable for any loss or damage arising from use of the site or reliance on its content.
• Independent project. Chip Field Guide is a personal project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any employer or company named on it, and its views are the author’s own.
• Outside links. Links to sources and other sites are for reference. Chip Field Guide doesn’t control them and isn’t responsible for their content.
• Acceptable use. Don’t scrape or download the site at a rate that burdens it, don’t pass the material off as your own, and don’t remove watermarks, credits or license notices. These terms don’t limit what the CC BY-NC license above allows.
• Changes. These terms may change; the version on this page applies.

Company and product names mentioned on Chip Field Guide, including transistor and process names, are trademarks or registered trademarks of their owners. They are used only to identify the products being explained. Their use doesn’t imply any affiliation with, or endorsement by, those companies.

• No accounts, cookies or ads. Chip Field Guide doesn’t ask who you are or follow you around the web.
• Anonymous visit counts. Chip Field Guide uses Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It sets no cookies and stores no personal information: it records the page, the referring site, and your country, browser, operating system and device type, and visits can’t be linked across days or sites. See Vercel’s analytics privacy notes.
• Your settings stay on your device. Your reading level, theme, quiz answers and progress are saved in your browser’s local storage, not sent anywhere. The button in the footer clears your progress and section settings.
• Hosting. Chip Field Guide is hosted on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel keeps standard server logs (such as IP address and browser type) to run and secure the service, under Vercel’s privacy notice.
• Children. Chip Field Guide is for readers of any age. The site itself collects no personal information, so none is collected from children either.
• If you get in touch, your message and contact details are used only to reply.

These keep their own licenses. Each is also credited where it appears.

• Photo: Monocrystalline silicon ingot, by ArticCynda, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
• Photo: Clean room, by NASA Glenn Research Center, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
• Photo: Silicon photonics 300 mm wafer, by Ehsanshahoseini, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Photo: Two rows of server cabinets (cold aisle), by Robert.Harker, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
• Photo: Data center roof, by Rsparks3, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
• Device and cell data from the open SkyWater SKY130 process kit (Apache 2.0) and the ASAP7 predictive kit (BSD 3-Clause), as cited in the chapters.
• Quotations and figures from papers, lecture notes and documentation are short excerpts used for teaching, each with a citation to its source.
• Built with open-source software, including Next.js, React, KaTeX and gifenc (MIT), and the JetBrains Mono, Manrope and Saira fonts (SIL Open Font License).

For permission to use material commercially, to report a mistake, or if you believe something here infringes your rights, email daniel@chipcodex.com or use the other contact options on the About page.