The CPU: From Conception to Birth 179
CrzyP writes "Most of us have seen flowcharts and heard lectures on how a CPU functions in a computer. What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created. Sudhian describes the step-by-step process of how a CPU is made, from grains of sand to a wafer of circuits. Ahhh sand, the building block of life...in the tech world!"
Google Cache Link ... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, duh. (Score:2, Informative)
The link [sudhian.com] works. Just a browser fart. Never mind.
A little on the short side, but with pretty pics (Score:5, Informative)
A quick search on Google ("silicon fabrication introduction") turns up arguably better links.
One from SGS Thompson [eteonline.com]
A basic one from Intel [intel.com]
From Bell Labs [bell-labs.com]
And there are plenty more.
So dull... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Decisions, decisions... (Score:3, Informative)
siliCON is for chips, siliCONE is for tits!
mod up! (Score:0, Informative)
Re:So dull... (Score:1, Informative)
What about die color? (Score:3, Informative)
About a year ago I bought a couple xp 1700s that overclocked amazingly high, obviously a high quality processor set aside for selling in the lower end market. It also was the green/amber shiney color.
"Build Your Own Metalworking Shop from Scrap" (Score:5, Informative)
Step one is to make a charcoal foundry, starting with a pail, fire clay, and a steel pipe. With this you can cast parts. You hand-carve wooden masters, make sand moulds, and pour molten metal into them.
Once you can cast, the next step is to build a lathe - the simplest machine tool. You'd probably have to make a very crude lathe first, but once you have even a crude lathe, you can make round things. Then you can make a better lathe.
The next tool is a shaper, or planer, which allows you to make flat things. You're now up to the machining technology of 1850 or so, and can make small steam engines. Take a look at a steam locomotive. It's all castings with a little finish machining. All the finish machining is either lathe or planer work - there are no milled parts with complex surfaces.
The other early power tool, not mentioned in Gingery, is a steam hammer. You don't need that for small work, but the steam hammer is the tool that made it possible to make stuff too big to hammer out by hand. Watt's factory had a steam hammer by 1810 or so.
Once you have the lathe and planer, you can build, with difficulty, a milling machine. Once you have a milling machine, you can build more milling machines without too much trouble. And you can build a better mill than the one you've got.
Once you have a good mill, you can make almost anything makeable in metal.
People have built machine tools from these books, so it's quite possible.
Much better article... (Score:4, Informative)
Lame... (Score:3, Informative)
For example, sand is not melted in a quartz bucket to make an ingot. Sand is Si02, or quartz. THe bucket would melt, and you;'d have an ingot full of Si and 02. Sand is made into gaseous silcon, called silane gas, which is then allowed to crystallize into a solid, chunks of which are melted in a quartz bucket.
Re:"Build Your Own Metalworking Shop from Scrap" (Score:4, Informative)
Instruments of Amplification [lindsaybks.com] that describes how to make your own electronic and electromechanical amplifiers from scratch. Great addition if you have to restart civilization on your own!
Re:What about die color? (Score:5, Informative)
The green/amber part you were looking at may have been a protective coating applied when the microprocessor was packaged. Regardless, microfabricated chips can indeed be technicolored marvels.
Most materials used in microfabrication are either transparent (insulating layers) or grey (metallization), but resulting devices can appear coloured due to optical interference [fsu.edu]. Colours present in structures of a microfabricated device are related to the thickness and composition of the patterned thin-film coatings that form the device. For a single thin film, thickness can be determined from, for example, the Michel-Lévy interference colour chart [microscopyu.com] if the birefringence of the thin film material is known. Variations in colour across a film indicate non-uniform thickness. The colour resulting from several layers of patterned thin-films is more complex to predict, but the same basic principles apply.
Some mistakes... (Score:3, Informative)
Although it's a neat effort to explain some engineering & physics to the avg case modder running XP & windowblinds (;-)) there's an initial nasty mistake:
The new wafers are then taken and doped appropriately for the type of transistors that will be made out of them. Doping amounts to depositing other elements into the space between silicon atoms. This is what causes silicon to be the "semiconductor" that it is. Transistors today are made from "CMOS" technology, or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors. Complementary means the interaction of "n" and "p" MOS
No, no... doping is about getting impurities inside the Si lattice substituting some of the Si atoms. The whole concept is: electron energy levels of a single atom becoming thick bands for hoards of electrons to fly within; if the next band is empty & close enough to the last full band you have an "intrinsic" semic. Doping the crystal means to get other atoms (P) into the lattice so that their electrons are weakly tied and readily bumped into the conduction band (@ room temp); or you plug greedy B into the lattice so that it grabs an e- all for itself leaving some other Si without and a roaming Hole inside the last full band...Leaving doping atoms wedged inside the lattice without participating to the whole electron/lattice exchange doesn't do anything good, perhaps it just deforms the reticle creating all sorts of defects & a useless brick of solid sand
Overall this article lacks a lot of geek factor... there's so many "cool" catchy words and processes like Silicon Over Insulator, Damascene Process, dovetail prevention, SiN and SuperK dielectric... bah, it could have been a LOT better... have a look in ars [arstechnica.com]Re:Many similar articles, but not one answers this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Best Place I Worked... (Score:2, Informative)
Where to get some extra power before Steam Engines (Score:3, Informative)
Still, just as you've mentioned, you can trade technology for labor, and you quickly discover why manufacturing processes in the past were so labor intensive for comparatively little actual product being produced.
Elementary-School Level, and Misleading (Score:2, Informative)
CrzyP writes "Most of us have seen flowcharts and heard lectures on how a CPU functions in a computer. What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created.
I swear I envisioned decisions of how many registers to do what, what the instruction set should include, pipelining, hardwired vs. microprogramming, etc. Insteresting Stuff, at least to this nerd.
BUT NOOOOOO, it's about:
Sudhian describes the step-by-step process of how a CPU is made, from grains of sand to a wafer of circuits.
It's about Semiconductor Physics, and has no special relation to CPU's any more than it does to RAM, IC Op-Amps, RF amplifiers or LED's. Okay, CPU's and RAM are a little different, unlike the others, they are made as dense as possible.
Then I actually read TFA, and I have to agree with other comments, it's a grammar-school general-technology lesson: Listen Up, boyz and girlz, Computers are made from Sand!
I've seen lots better stuff in the obligatory semiconductor-physics first chapter of any transistor circuits analysis book from the past 50 or more years. Of course that chapter was like the Venn diagrams that start out many high school math books, very few readers would ever actually use the info in a later class or in a career.
For some Real Info, I recall a "The Amateur Scientist" column from late-60's or early 70's Scientific American that described making "thin-film transistors" - surely not the quality of a commercial 2-cent 2N2222, but something that has gain.
Or even the Smithsonian Magazine article on an Intel manufacturing plant, ISTR the cover had someone in a bunny suit holding a wafer. It wasn't even about the chips themselves, but about the evolution of the clean room, and factoids about the waterfall process to clean the air - did you know the air in clean rooms is completely replaced three times a minute? Not a lot of Real Technical stuff, but still more informative than TFA.
Re:Best Place I Worked... (Score:2, Informative)
There are many other dangerous substances in a chip fab like silan, arsin, phosphin, chlourtriflouride (now thats nasty). But all over all the amount is pretty low and everything is sealed of insanely well. It is much more dangerous to work in a chemical plant.
Re:Best Place I Worked... (Score:2, Informative)
I too have heard that it's the most evil 30 seconds of life that you'll ever finish with, but of course there were never any problems with that crap.
They had enough problems selling enough chips to keep me employed, and in that they failed miserably.