Will Pratt

A lot of 25 simulated wafers (FIG. 1, mark 10). Colored failures (FIG. 1, mark 14) form patterns across the gray passing dies, and teal rings (FIG. 1, mark 12) mark the six wafers flagged for review.

Tap a numeral to find it in the figure.

The live site runs a lot of about 2 million dies and redraws it in a few milliseconds, whether the view shows all 25 wafers or a single die.

From a lot to a single die.

Getting there meant learning some well-worn tricks. The engine works out the color of each pixel on the canvas, so a frame costs about the same however many dies there are.

It keeps smaller copies of every wafer for zoomed-out views, the way games keep smaller textures, and reads the original die data up close (Detail B).

New wafers are patched in one at a time, so the camera and the gallery never jump.

Detail BReduced to fit

I kept value (FIG. 2, mark 20) and quality (FIG. 2, mark 22) on separate axes so a low price does not hide weak fundamentals.

It scores about 3,000 US companies against their peers, using free data from Yahoo Finance.

Ranked against similar companies.

The upper-right corner contains companies that score well on both axes. The shortlist limits how many come from any one peer group (FIG. 3, mark 30).

Each entry carries separate value and quality scores (FIG. 3, mark 32), and every company page shows the inputs behind them.

The other half of the challenge was making it pleasant to use. Pointing at a company in the list lights its dot on the plot, and each shortlisted dot opens its company page.