I sometimes wonder whether integrated-circuit manufacturing wasn't sent to us by time-travellers from the future. Our ability to manufacture useful things, on such tiny scales, to such high precision, doesn't seem to match up with our comparatively-poor capabilities in other areas of manufacturing.
Many other things could be manufactured "on such tiny scales, to such high precision", but they wouldn't be useful.
Integrated circuits are one of a few product/technology classes for which miniaturization is unconditionally good (improved power consumption, lower unit cost, possibly higher speed) up to unavoidable physical limits (e.g. randomly arranged doping atoms, noise vulnerability).
Integrated circuits are also very easy to interface with the "real world" despite miniaturization because of their electronic nature: a comfortable range of currents and voltages is tolerable for the integrated circuit and acceptable for the larger system.
There's a series on transistors that covers this. There's basically no mechanical process since everything is done via etching and litho. Leads to the results you see.
