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!"
DNA microarrays (Score:5, Interesting)
DNA microarrays from Affymetrix, used to quantify gene expression, are built on a process inspired from CPU design (photolitography - read more about it here [affymetrix.com]). Chips are getting more complex with time, ala Moore Law (shrinking the probe cells to get more density); the most recent human chip harbor 1 300 000 probes representing 39000 transcripts and variants.
So technology developed for CPU is helping to find cures for diseases, increase our knowledge of life... etc. Isn't cool?
Starting from scratch (Score:5, Interesting)
The thought experiment I perform is to imagine what it would take to get the end product from absolutely nothing except the stuff around you found naturally. Working in the basement of the University of Washington physics laboratory, I often wondered how someone would build a milling machine or an industrial lathe. You can cut wood with rudimentary tools, and making crude iron or steel tools isn't too complicated, but how would construct a precise machine with all the guages and dials and electric motors and so on?
It sure brings me to a realization of just how far we have come from slogging about in mud and eating rats like we did in the dark ages. Our world is so complicated that no one person can understand more than a small fraction of it. Everyone is a specialist of one sort of another, even the garbage collectors and sewage system maintainers. Every generation of worker brings ingenuity to the job, and bit by bit their job becomes more and more complicated yet efficient.
Soon, will we each have a small chunk of humanity's experience in our skulls? Will we rule an insanely complicated world governed by machines and processes no one can fully understand? Or have we already come to that point?
Parent wasn't a troll (Score:5, Interesting)
Many similar articles, but not one answers this... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've got a sample 100mm wafer on my desk with several hunderd ICs of some sort arranged in a grid on it. The ICs are only 4mm x 4mm, but the distance between them is about 0.1mm.
What sort of cutting device is used to chop these 4x4 squares out of the die without messing up the adjacent ones?
This wafer isn't special in any way and I'm sure other wafers would have a similarly small gap because it's a waste of space not to.
A Dremel? A frickin' laser beam? Anyone?
Best Place I Worked... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was like a geek's heaven inside. Everything was the best, new and working just right. They spent something like 1.5 billion pounds ($3 billion US) on the place. Hell, even the coffee machines were wonderful.
Inside the (huge) clean room was best - fully automated monorails all over the ceiling, carrying pods of wafers around, for instance. Row upon row of ovens with pure oxygen atmospheres at several hundred degrees C, implanters using silly amount of electricity (and huge copper hooks to remove people stuck), and incredibly dangerous chemicals being piped all over (including the very scary HF - 'If it leaks near you, there's no point in running').
Wonderful stuff. It was all incredibly interesting, to see all the processes that went into making (relatively simple) RAM chips.
Shame the arse fell out of the DRAM market in 1999, meaning they closed the place. Atmel are using it now.
Re:What about die color? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Specialization, optimization, and crisis (Score:3, Interesting)
A classic example of this was the gold mines in Virginia City, Nevada. For about 10-15 years miners spent quite a bit of time (and very dangerous effort) trying to extract gold out of the mountains around the city. They started to dump the tailings from the gold mining into one area, when one very enterprising individual discovered that the talings were very high in silver. Very quietly he ended up buying the tailings (they were already out of the ground, so he didn't have to buy the mines or pay miners in the same way), and made a huge fortune off of silver.
The same thing can be said about some modern municipal landfills, many of which have a serious problem that they have to deal with: The production of methane. Uncontrolled, it becomes a major pollution issue, but if you tap into it you can turn many "city dumps" into substantial natural gas producing fields.
Perhaps the most misunderstood problem is with nuclear waste. Most nuclear waste is due to the fact that the production centers are very ineffeciently using uranium and the by-products of nuclear power plants can't in turn be reused. In theory they can, and in fact with highly effecient breeder-reactor facilities you can totally dispose of most nuclear waste by "reburning" the waste in the plant itself. The political problem from this is that a facility that can completely dispose of nuclear waste in this manner also has the ability to produce large quantities of Plutonium, in quantities pure enough that it needs to be dilluted in order to make bombs out of it. I am not kidding here either. Yucca Mountain is not a technological issue, it is a political decision to deliberately make innefficient nuclear power plants to stall off a considerably worse political problem if the technology becomes widespread for breeder reactors.
Locally where I live, an aggressive recycling program has brought about an extended lifetime to the "city dump", and pushed its lifetime to be usable for another 20-30 years. The #1 thing they did was to do seperate processing of "green waste", including a seperate collection system with its own "garbage cans" and collection trucks that collect only plant materials, like grass clippings, leaves, branches, etc. The city then processes and mulches this green waste and then in turn sells it as quality topsoil or garden mulch. The sale of these materials almost pays for the whole collection of the stuff in the first place, and the garbage rates the city charges encourage citizens to participate.
There certainly is a small amount of "waste" that somehow has to be dealt with, but the point I'm making here is that there is considerable room for improvement, and we are no where near the limits you seem to be implying.
An interesting issue that you can deal with as well if you are going to write this paper you described is the expanding realm of what we call our environment systems. At first most people worried about the environment of their home, then their local community. Nomadic people dealt with this issue by simply moving when the local resources gave out. When people started to build cities it became considerably harder to abandon a city, but sometimes that has happened, and still does happen every once in a while. Now you have cities acting as specialists, like Delta, Utah, where they have one of the largest coal-fired electric power plants in the world [uamps.com], because they are "importing" air pollution from Los Angeles, who is the primary buyer of their electricity. BTW, the stats for that plant are staggering, especially since the plant itself is in a town of just a couple thousand in a very rural part of Utah. Right now there is considerable awareness of the fact that we no longer can deal with environ