Slashdot Mirror
From Silicon To Microprocessors
prostoalex writes "Jim Turley from Embedded Systems Programming magazine answers the question of where microprocessors come from. While the public generally knows about the silicon and microprocessor vendors, few can describe the process of turning the beach sand into the latest and greatest several-hundred-dollars-worth CPU."
Batman touched my junk liberally. he strapped me in to his batmobile and he couldnt keep his offensive hands off of me. he was performing many red flag touches. i couldnt believe what the fuck was going on. i told batman the city would not approve of a millionaire touching an underage kid for free.
Can you believe it? Batman did all this. He picked me off the street, strapped my arms and legs down in the batmobile's passenger seat, and just wouldn't stop fondling my cock'n'balls.
They definately were red flag touches. the goddamn referee he had in the back seat kept on raising up this red flag every time he touched my junk but did batman care? NO WAY! He just kept on doing it. I couldn't believe what the fuck was going on, indeed. I pleaded with Mr. Wayne but to no avail. I told him the city would not approve of such a wealthy man touching an underage kid like me (at the time I was 13) without at least compensating me for the trauma and the use of my body as his own personal plaything.
This got to him, worrying about his image. He continued to fondle me, all the while ignoring the referee's red flags. Then he drove the batmobile to my house and *ejected the seat I was in*! It was amazing. But surprisingly, after I woke up the next morning, my bank account had $150k in it! Can you believe it?
PS - how do you subject line trolls get slashdot to accept an apparently empty post body?
do mention the filthy poisons released by chip fabs. in thrid-woirld countries like korea and germany. all for a quick buck. the shame of it all...
The microprocessor stork brings them.
Right, mommy?
I have been pwned because my
fp
Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Co
208 Harbor Drive Stamford, CT 06912-0061 (203) 973-6700 Fax (203) 359-8066 metagroup.com Copyright (C) 2002 META Group, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 December 2002 File: SIS 1037 The Real Value of Linux Server Infrastructure Strategies Kevin McIsaac Under the guise of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) in a tough economic environment, technical staffs are recommending replacement of Windows with Linux on their servers. This is based on the flawed assumption that because Linux is "free" it will reduce TCO. On closer inspection, it appears the recommendation is more an emotionally driven reaction against Microsoft than a factual case for Linux. Astute IT organizations will recognize that Linux's true value is derived more from the price/performance of the commodity Intel hardware it enables than from its open source characteristics. Our research indicates a strong interest in using Linux in the data center, but few clients understand the real value of Linux, nor have many clients embarked on major Linux projects outside of Web server farms, appliances (network-attached storage [NAS]), or general infrastructure servers (e.g., DNS, DHCP). Through 1Q03, Linux will begin to penetrate the application server tier, with IBM and BEA targeting Linux on Intel as a low-cost J2EE platform. By 1H03, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) will demonstrate adequate highavailability clustering capabilities, enabling Linux to begin penetrating the low-end enterprise database market (i.e., 2-4 CPUs -- see Figure 1). By YE04, Lintel will constitute 25% of server sales for the application server tier and 10% of server sales in the database tier. By YE07, this will increase to 40% and 25% respectively. Although Linux has established a foothold in the Web tier due to the popularity of the Apache Web server (see SIS Delta 947), it still ranks a distant third (10% of Fortune 1000 companies) behind Solaris (30%) and Windows (50%). By 2007, Linux and Windows on Intel ("Lintel" and "Wintel") will be the dominant platform for the application server tier, leaving RISC/Unix vendors competing with IBM mainframes in the high-end database server tier (i.e., >8 CPUs). The success of Linux will come primarily at the expense of Unix (e.g., Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) rather than Windows servers. Indeed, the true value of Linux is as a viable alternative server operating system (OS) for commodity Intel hardware. Linux has emerged as the darling of the "technical crowd," yet the interest appears be more emotional than factual, and is based on a questionable lower-cost-of-ownership argument. The Linux OS license is "free," but that does not ensure that total cost of ownership will be reduced (see SIS Delta 1035). For example, Linux requires more staffing resources and effort to match the reliability, availability, and scalability of high-end Unix and Windows 2000 or XP servers (see SIS Delta 890). Users must purchase high-availability add-ons (e.g., clustering partitioning, "journaled" file systems) and support from third parties, which increases cost and complexity. Through 1Q04, this will limit Linux use to applications that do not demand high levels of reliability, availability, and scalability in a single server, such as Web server farms, application server farms, non-mission-critical applications, and, as Oracle RAC matures, DBMS clusters. Even if all other Linux costs were the same, the impact of its free OS license on total cost of ownership of a significant project (e.g., ERP, CRM) would be minimal, because the OS license fee typically is less than 2%-3% of the TCO. It is only when other significant pieces of software can be licensed at little or no cost (e.g., office suite, e-mail, DBMS) that TCO reduction is at a level significant enough to merit the additional complexity, risks, and potential cost overruns of Linux. META Trend: With highly distributed n-tier (DBMS, application, Web) server architectures commoditizing during 2002-04, Unix (other than Solaris) will recede to highend, low-volume, niche-platform status by 2005/06. Windows will i
This process will change significantly by 2010.
Neuro/bio/nano-computing will take over traditional methods of chip fabrication.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
DICK
YOU FAIL IT.
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)(Use the Praview Botton! Check those URLs!)(Use the Priviw Bttn! Chack those ORLs!)(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
That, my friends, is a really unpleasant image.
Then it's sliced into exceptionally thin wafers about 6 to 8 inches (200 to 300mm) across, depending on the diameter of the ingot.
Owwww!!!!
[quote]New chips generally cost a few million dollars to design, but that's small beer compared to what it costs to build a new chip-making factory. Fabs or foundries, as they're called, cost upwards of $2 billion to build. You could buy a lot of cruise missiles for that kind of money or several small Caribbean republics (island not included). [/quote] ermmm fkn hell wish wash article - sorry just winging :P
http://www.thegreynomads.com
I read "Silicone to Micro" and panicked.
Been up some 30 hours drinking Monster and Bawls... uhhhh...
--
What Happened to the censorware project?
Eds, please pic more specific topics. The front page is beginning to look like a an e-store selling motherboards.
1. Get a bunch of sand.
2. ???
3. Microprocessors!
or at least so I gather from the frequency with which the Silicone/Silicon mistake is made. Maybe if computer chips were warm instead of hot, and squeezably soft instead of hard, and bouncy always bouncy people would know more about them.
I'd always thought these materials were made in hot, dry climates, like Arizona, yet there was a supplier right in my backyard.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Dick was obsessed with his dick.
He would beat off at least three times a day:
In the morning, when he woke up,
Right after or right before dinner,
Or right before he went to sleep.
If he didn't get in his three daily beat-off sessions,
He was a pain in the ass to be around.
He jerked off to tv-
Especially I Dream of Jenie and Dynasty and Charlie's Angels;
He pulled his pud to porno books;
He even jerked off
To the underwear ads
In the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times.
If you were a girl, talking to him on the phone,
Chances are he was beating his meat to the sound of your voice.
'Cause coming was his raison d'etre.
One time he was in the middle of jerking off to Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune
When a job offer came to him over the phone
And he needed the job bad
But he told the man he'd call him right back,
'Cause he needed to come more than he needed the job.
It wasn't that he was ugly or afraid of women or anything like that
He just honestly preferred his right hand.
I saw him the other day,
And he told me that last friday he was with two girls at their place
And they both wanted him to stay over.
But he went home,
Called up another girl,
and jacked off while talking to her.
I don't know why he tells me this stuff.
Dick's a fucked up guy.
Hellacious spawning vats in the dark dungeons of Intel, AMD, IBM, and Apple.
...
*sqlorch*
*SQLORCH*
*Ding!*
The coolest voice ever.
I agree with this post.
The only thing I don't like about the process is the working conditions: annoyingly loud!
:)
For those of you that have never been in a clean room, there is a tremendous amount of ambient sound due to the very important air cleaning/circulation system. In order to make the clean room "clean", there can only be so much dust particles in the air. (e.g. 1ppm) (there are actually different classes of clean rooms)
The ramification of this is that one can hardly hear one's voice. Personally, I'm glad I'm not in the semiconductor field
A knowledge of history is almost always a Good Thing. I wonder how many programmers have never heard of Charles Babbage? ("Analytical Engine? What?") You should at least have a decent knowledge of the history of your craft. Call me old-fashioned, but my love of computer science isn't limited by EnterpriseJavaBeans and BiCapitalizedMumboJumbo and whatever buzzword happens to be out today. There's more to it than that.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
I would have tried that if I thought for a second it would have worked. Mashcode is pretty crappy then.
Oh well, I guess what's important works. (ie developing and protecting the incestuous hivemind by removing people in the minority of M2 decisions from eligibility for mod points)
Finally the riddle to where breasts come from has been solved...
If you can visit Santa Clara USA then Intel's museum has a nice introduction to the process of turning sand into chips.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
V I S A
vodka, straight up, thank you!
That's pretty funny. If I hadn't been banned from mod points for disagreeing with the hivemind I'd give you +1, Insightful.
I read the article and find myself actually knowing in advance how silicon chips are made. You see, in the 80ies we had childrens books about computers that covered something more than how to start Word and update Winblows.
a couple of macroprocessors get drunk, start messing around... they wake up the next morning full of regret... next thing you know, there's a new microprocessor for someone to install, dress up in a nice case, feed it RAM, and reboot it when it makes a mess, which will be all the damn time for the first few months...
"Where do microprocessors come from, Daddy?" That's an awkward question we all must answer at some stage in our careers. What mysterious process converts elemental silicon into elemental forces like Intel's Itanium or Motorola's PowerPC? Let us explore the wonder that is semiconductor creation.
"When a customer and a vendor love each other very much . . ." they make a commitment to produce new chips. It's a big commitment, too. New chips generally cost a few million dollars to design, but that's small beer compared to what it costs to build a new chip-making factory. Fabs or foundries, as they're called, cost upwards of $2 billion to build. You could buy a lot of cruise missiles for that kind of money or several small Caribbean republics (island not included).
The amortization sucks, too. That $2 billion foundry will be obsolete in less than five years, so you're looking at more than $1 million of depreciation every single day. Very little of that cost goes into the silicon itself. You're mostly paying for the exotic equipment inside, including the neat-o air conditioners in the clean room.
In the beginning
Silicon chips all start out with, well, silicon. It's one of Earth's basic immutable chemical elements (element 14 in the periodic table, for those keeping score at home) and is basically purified beach sand. We're not likely to run out of this resource anytime soon. Tell your in-laws, by the way, that silicon is not the same as silicone. Silicone makes good weather stripping, a lubricant for squeaky hinges, and a source of income for cosmetic surgeons. It's not good for making microprocessor chips.
Raw silicon is grown into crystal ingots, which look like giant silver bolognas. Then it's sliced into exceptionally thin wafers about 6 to 8 inches (200 to 300mm) across, depending on the diameter of the ingot. Wafer (and ingot) diameters are standardized so that anyone's wafers can be processed in anyone's fab. A 300mm wafer is about as big around as a dinner plate and large enough for about 500 average-size chips.
From this point on, everything else happens in the fab's fancy clean room. "Clean" understates the case; these rooms are astonishingly, unbelievably sanitary. The best clean rooms are 1,000 times more pure and unpolluted than a hospital operating room. Stainless steel is everywhere; the floors and ceiling are perforated to promote air circulation; horizontal surfaces are sloped to avoid trapping dust, and yellow lighting discourages growth of single-cell organisms.
Clean room workers wear the now-familiar bunny suits. Looking like astronauts, these people are fully encapsulated and learn to recognize coworkers by their eyes. Getting in or out of a bunny suit takes about 15 minutes and involves walking across sticky floor mats and through an air shower. Breaks need to be carefully planned.
Let's see what develops
If you're a photographer or develop film in your own darkroom you'll already be familiar with what comes next. Silicon chips are made the same way that black and white prints are made. The entire fab is basically an enormous one-hour photo lab. The silicon wafer is the photographic print paper and the chip design is the negative. Mass-producing chips involves exposing the same negative a few hundred times over the entire surface of the wafer. When the wafer's been completely covered with chip "prints," you're done.
A whole lot of things make this process more complicated than it sounds. First off, silicon wafers aren't photosensitive, so simply exposing them to light doesn't do anything. The wafers have to be coated with photoresist, a chemical concoction that conducts electricity but is also sensitive to light. After the wafer is evenly coated with resistwhich itself is
i worked in a class 1 facility and noise was there, but hardly annoying. nothing near those of other manufacturing facilities.
You should be! You've been lied to. Your tax money has been taken from you and spent under false pretenses. Your children have been sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war launched without Congressional approval. You who fought in the war and think you came back home healthy, well, you've been lied to as well. Your health is all downhill from here (ask any Vet from Desert Storm), and your children will have a higher incidence of birth defects because that depleted uranium isn't as harmless as you were told it was. And those VA medical benefits you were promised? That was a lie too. Are you angry yet?
And those of you who sold your better judgment for a free hot-dog and a flag at a Clear Channel sponsored pro-Bush rally, well, you were lied to as well, and worse, made to look totally stupid before the rest of the world. The media which walked right past peace demonstrations to video tape the Clear Channel party plastered your face across the TV sets of the planet, waving your flag and shouting "Sig WMD! Sig WMD" and singing "Dubya Dubya Uber Alles" or something to that effect. And here you stand now, with egg on your collective faces, finally facing up to what your more intelligent neighbors knew all along; There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush made a total fool of you. The whole world is laughing at you. Those lacking the courage to admit they were wrong will no doubt descend into the ranks of fanatical "true believers", ready to drink the Kool-Aid for his highnessness der Dubyer. For the rest of you brave enough to admit you were fooled, are you angry yet?
And for you Congressional types reading this web site (and I know that many of you do), Bush made total jackasses out of you as well. Under the Constitution, which you are sworn to uphold, only Congress can declare war. Changing the name to "police action" or "battle" does not get you off of the hook. When our army marches into another nation to take it over, that's a war by any meaningful definition of the word. So, you passed a bill that authorized the President to send in the military to Iraq, but ONLY if the President could prove that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN Resolution 1441. The President said he had proof, and you did not check him on it. And now that the world knows that the President did not actually have any such proof, the world knows that the US Congress failed in their job. You were had, used, swindled, conned, etc. Bush bypassed you. He got his illegal war right past you. The President has made the entire Congress look like weak and impotent idiots and fools before the rest of the world for not exercising due diligence over a serious matter like war. Are you angry yet?
Our media has tried to teach us all that hate and anger are bad. Anger must be "managed". Hate of any and all kinds must be suppressed. Well, I am here to tell you that certain hates and angers are not only justified, they are essential. I hate drug dealers, don't you? I hate liars, don't you? You're a sucker if you don't. I hate spies who use deception to trick our nation into doing things it ought not to be doing. Hate and anger helped drive the British out of the colonies 1776. Hate and anger fueled the victory of WW2, which is why Bush, with his lies, tried to trick us all (or at least the gullible ones) into hating and being angry at a designated target for invasion.
I am very angry. #$%^#%$ anger management, I am pissed off! And if you carry any of the blood of those who made this nation what it is today you have to be angry too. You should be angry. You must be angry. Because right now there is a battle about to start over whether this nation will continue to be ruled by those who lie, or whether the liars will be kicked out. Whether we will have honest government or not. Whether we will be slaves to liars, or free citizens with honorable and respectful and fair government.
Be angry. Be very angry. Hate liars. Focus your anger on them. Drive them from office and from the media. There is no other choice but permanent servitude.
the latest and greatest several-hundred-dollars-worth CPU.
;-) The CPU's in these are a couple thousand dollars each.
Only if you're buying intel can you get the latest and greatest for only several-hundred-dollars-worth. We call the intel servers at work "tinker-toys" because they are wimpy and cannot get much real work done.
The Alphaserver GS160, the IBM RS/6000, and the Sunfire 12k. Those are the manly servers that do the real work around here. I don't think you can replace fans in these things for "several-hundred-dollars-worth".
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Mycket markligt.
While informative on what it touches on, this doesn't describe what goes into making a chip. It describes how a chip is patterned. Then follows many many diffusion, oxidation, etch, and metallization steps that go between each photoresist mask step. I suppose it makes a good read for someone who wants just a general overview. But it makes it sound like making a chip is just a glorified film development process. I do microfab work, and the lithography steps are the steps we take for granted (mostly -- they still do take effort to get right, but are in general easier then what follows).
What was with that toilet paper squeezing pervert anyway?
Having smaller die sizes is not good just because you can put more dies on a wafer. It is because your yield will improve. Dust/contamination is the real enemey, and bigger dies have an (exponentially or even worse) higher risk of having one dust particle destroying the chip function. Cutting the size with 10% may well lower the production cost by 50%.
.18 to .13) can be a real money saver (next to allowing higher clock rates).
And that is ofcourse why moving to a smaller technology (eg from
From the article:
For an example, let's look at a 200mm silicon wafer, which has about 986cm2 of surface area. That's about the size of a salad plate. Let's say your chips are square (most are) and they measure 10mm on a side?that's 100mm2 per chip. If the silicon wafer was also square you could fit 986 chips on your wafer. Alas, wafers are round so you can really only get about 279 chips on a wafer.
I guess the obvious question, since using squares on a round wafer wastes a certain amount of silicon, is why squares? Why not build a hex grid? That would seem to maximize the usage of the available area.
But then, I suppose cutting them out would be significantly more difficult.
What about triangles, then? Straight lines up and down, and in one (or both) diagonal directions.
On the other hand, someone's already thought of this:
Intel's old i960MX microprocessor was octagonal. It was so big its corners had to be cut off.
So my idea has an obvious flaw. The question is... what is it?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Mr. Weed: "I shall call you Eduardo!"
You leave some silicon under your pillow and the next morning you will find the processor she leaves you. She is a little behind the times, still making Slot 1 types. Stupid bitch.
I thought big screen TVs were "blurry" up close because they had fewer pixels per area. Besides... in this case, you wouldn't be making the image bigger, you would just be making a LOT of tiny images at once. Can someone either explain how his explaination makes sense, or what the real reason is?
"Embedded Systems Programming magazine"
Isn't this a tad specific? Why not a magazine about processors period? Is that too big? Just how much content can you have being specific about Embedded Systems Programming. Seriously, I'm asking.
And if it's about Programming, why is this an article about processors? I'm so lost, and i don't think it's my fault this time. Flame away boys i'm bored.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
So you're saying new processors are the result of men and women sweating away for days and months? And here I thought the Penguin brought them! (Tux, natch)
Ralph: IBM and Apple were in the closet making processors and I saw one of the processors and then the processor looked at me.
Disclaimer: This comment was generated by a Flock of Trained Microsoft Programmers for Aqua_Geek.
Sometimes, when a CPU and a CPU socket meet in the middle of a back alley...
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
I think he's talking about the fact that focus is consistent on a sphere, not a plane. Since the chips are flat, the image you project on them is only perfectly focused on a circle (the intersection of the perfect-focus sphere with the plane of the wafer). You can see this happen with regular slide-, TV-, or film-projection as well.
It sounds like they focus the center exactly and let it get blurry the further out you go (this is the case where the plane is tangent to the sphere -- a zero-radius circle of focus, which is of course a point). I would think they would set the cicle to be larger in order to get more area of better focus, but maybe having some blurring in the center screws up their designs more.
Dunno, IANAMCFA. (Dare anyone to figure out what that one meant.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hmmm, and all this time I thought 200mm wafers were 8 inches and 300mm wafers were 12 inches. Maybe the author is a former NASA engineer...
And I agree, clean rooms are no fun. Ever trying typing on a plastic-coated miniature keyboard with two pairs of gloves?
They don't use beachsand, that's silicon dioxide (SiO2), also known as quartz.
Pure silicon chunks are actually made from condensing a very pure Silicon gas called Silane. The chunks are broken up, and melted in a very hot furnace, with a crucible made out of quartz(usually). Any doping, or impurities to give the silicon it's different electrical properties are added at this point. Boron (B) is fairly common.
Then, a nice perfect seed crystal of silicon is dipped into the molten silicon which starts to crystalize around the seed crystal. The growing crystal is turned and slowly pulled out of the liquid silicon as it grows to help keep it regular. The result is called a boule, or "the bologna looking thing"
As a side note, the doping is usually too high at the top of the boule, and too low at the end of the boule, so only about the middle 25% is used.
Then it gets sliced into wafers. etc. etc.
There are more than a few nits...
.13u, .18u, or larger.
(1) Silicon is not sand. Sand is silicon dioxide (well, most sand). It needs to be reduced (the oxygen needs to be removed) and purified. And purified. And purified. (I believe Brazilian quartz is actually the preferred stock for silicon dioxide, rather than sand, due to its purity.)
(2) Photo-resist does not need to be electrically conductive. It does need to be capable of resisting attack by whatever chemicals are next in the step (especially the HF). Since they're usually polymers that are either polymerized or depolymerized by the exposure, they generally are not conductive.
(3) Current generation laser steppers are not EUV. (They are UV, maybe DUV, being slightly less than 1/2 the wavelength of visible indigo.)
(4) One could get the impression that each chip on the wafer is processed separately at each step.
(5) Fabs and foundries are related but distinct entities. (I personally have worked in a fab, but never a foundry.)
(6) It's the mask that is imprinted on the wafer's photoresist, not the chip.
(7) Moore's law is incorrectly repeated. This is especially bad because it claims to be correcting the common belief (which it probably is). Moore's law was about the economics of chip density -- the most _cost effective_ density doubles every 18 months.
(8) I've usually heard and talked about individual die and multiple dice. (And breaking up wafers into chips is called dicing.) Maybe others call them (plural) die, but not everyone.
(9) The 200mm wafer area calculations are wrong. A 200mm wafer has a radius of 10cm; the area is therefore (10)^2*pi ~= 310cm^2. So one won't get 986 die from a square wafer and only 279 from a round one.
(10) Lots and lots of companies don't build their chips on the smallest feature sizes possible. Very few can afford to manufacture 90nm chips at this point, so the bulk of chip _designs_ are manufactured at
There are probably many more errors...
RJ
While the article is a good introduction.. I think he omitted an important step in chip fab. IIRC, after you expose the photoresist and wash away the exposed sections, you need to pour a special acid which seeps into the channels of the photoresist and etches the patern into the silicon. Then you can remove the photoresist layer and move on.
As he explained it he never mentions how the pattern get burned into the silicon. Tsk tsk.
But then, I suppose cutting them out would be significantly more difficult.
What about triangles, then? Straight lines up and down, and in one (or both) diagonal directions.
Well, NVidia discovered rotating them 45 degrees give them a diamond instead of a square. Think they're onto something?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Donald Duck is going to have a SCREAMING ORGASM when he finally finds out where microprocessors cum from.
More to the point, why are humans required at all in the manufacturing process. I would expect the entire manufacturing and testing process, from sand to plastic-encased chip, to be automated enough that people in bunny suits should not be needed. Maybe they are needed to replace the robots and fill up the supplies, but other than that, what do they do?
"Where do microprocessors come from, Daddy?" That's an awkward question we all must answer at some stage in our careers. What mysterious process converts elemental silicon into elemental forces like Intel's Itanium or Motorola's PowerPC? Let us explore the wonder that is semiconductor creation.
Shouldn't that include IBM?
the process of turning the beach sand into the latest and greatest
I always wondered why people bragged about their new computer and made the comment about leaving mine in the dust!
Jonathanjk.com
Yeah well when I live in Los Angeles...
with their dego moustaches and greasy hair!
The article mentions that, with co-workers encased in bunny suits, you have to look at their eyes to tell people apart. When I worked in a fab, I noticed I became very attuned to people's body shapes and ways of moving. After working there for a while, I could subconsciously identify co-workers at the opposite end of a shopping mall, simply by the way they walked.
Because most of the cost of chip making is in the equipment, not the silicon, your profitability depends entirely on volume. It's fairly accurate to say that the first chip costs you $2 billion to make; all the chips after that are free.
I think you`ll find that sensible people apply the "matching" principle when dealing with the cost of equipment. You spread the cost over its useful life in order to _match_ to expenditure with revenues. The method outlined would produce skewed results - which is why it is not used in the preparation of accounts.
"is basically purified beach sand" - since when is deoxidation considered purification? "about 6 to 8 inches (200 to 300mm)" - make that 8 - 12 inches... slightly sad that such trivial mistakes/oversimplicications are made in an otherwise good article...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Unless you are talking about a clean room from the late 70s or the 80s, its more likely that the noise you are hearing is from the exhaust systems sucking fumes from processing equipment.
The materials used to produce semiconductors are extremely deadly to humans as are many of the process by products.
Pretty much every processing tool has multiple exhaust connections which remove potentially harmful fumes to a scrubbing system on the roof that removes the toxic chemicals which are then treated and disposed.
There are other noises from the tools and support equipment but I assume you thought it was the laminar air flow filtering system because it sounded like high volume air movement. They do move high volumes of air but you don't want the air moving too fast as it will stir up any particles that may be present in the room.
burnin
oh, I do work in a clean room, have since 1989.
In a semiconductor factory yield is a measure of the percentage of good die versus the total number of potential die on a wafer. It is not the measure of the total number of die produced from a wafer and is therefore not directly affected by the size of the die.
.35 microns the same process was destroying die because the tiny particles it introduced suddenly were big enough to start creating a significant number of shorts. Needless to say I had my work cut out for me as the equipment required some reengineering along with the process.
You are correct that smaller die sizes produce more die per wafer, however, shrinking the structures in a die's circuit make it more susceptible to failure due to contamination. Therefore you are actually wrong when you state that a smaller die will yield more.
You can think about it this way. If you have two parallel conducting poly lines that are seperated by an insulator that is 1 inch wide and you drop a penny on the insulator it is likely that the insulator will still work because the penny, which is the contaminant, is not large enough to short across the insulator. If you take that insulator and shrink it down to 1/4 of an inch and drop the same contaminating penny on it there is a chance that it will short the two poly conductors across the insulator and destroy your circuit. Take that same circuit and shrink it to 0.01 inch lines and suddenly your process that ran wonderfully is destroying every die on the wafer because the penny is guaranteed to short the circuit every time.
So what you can derive from this is two things. First, the smaller contaminating particles are the less likely they are to destroy a die and may actually be acceptable, the smaller a die gets the more likely it will be destroyed by smaller particles and you plunge into a never ending battle of cleaning up smaller and smaller sized particles.
Speaking from experience I watched a process that ran for 10+ years and worked fine. Once the geometries in the die shrunk to
burnin
Your ideas are good, thinking out of the box, and check this out for thinking out of the box, spherical semiconductor circuits.
Ball Technologies
burnin
And I agree, clean rooms are no fun. Ever trying typing on a plastic-coated miniature keyboard with two pairs of gloves?
That sounds awkward but you ever tried typing 2000+ lines of hex code on a ZX81?
Santa brought me one of those, a rubiks cube, a metal detector and the 1982 Guinness Book of World Records (Train spotter's edition I think) for christmas. I think my mum must have told him I was doing poorly in school or something. I do recall though, I specifically asked Santa, at his grotto in the local Co-op, for a BMX, a swingball, a skateboard and the single "Pass The Dutchie" by Musical Youth.Regardless of all of that, I came to love my proper, if somewhat temperamental, little computer and after many a marathon session of learning Sinclair Basic and even some Z80 machine code I grew up to become, even if I say so myself, a very proficient IT Manager/Database Developer.
It does make me think though, if Santa had actually brought me what I wanted, then how dramatically different my life might have been...And, I also can't help but think...
what a fat, white bearded and overly jolly bastard Santa really is.
Smart comment, but of course its already been done.
;) Just ask a Perkin Elmer technician.
Perkin Elmer made a big business of selling scan aligners. They use a one to one mask and scan an arc of light across the two for exposure. Or more accurately, the mask and wafer are scanned through the arc of light.
This works but has its own problems. And you may find this surprising but the biggest problem is focus.
The greatest difficulty with a large mask is getting the wafer perfectly flat across the entire surface. You end up with bad focus spots all over the wafer. But this is okay for larger geometries so the scan aligners are still in service in some processes.
Now there are several reasons why a stepper with a small mask works better but your going to be shocked to discover that better focus is one of them.
But it makes sense when you think about it. Since you are exposing a very small area on the wafer you can focus on just that small area and you are likely to avoid focus problems across the exposed area because it is smaller. Each time you step to a new area to expose you refocus thus reducing the problems with high and low areas across the wafer. Since you can getter better focus with a stepper you can expose much smaller lines.
No more stoning the chuck.
burnin
soon after the photo resist is developed it goes through an etch process which is usually a dip in a nice acid bath, or a shower in a nice acid spray, or my favorite, a plasma treatment in a vacuum chamber with RF or microwave and wonderful gases like Sulfur Hexafluoride, Hydrogen Bromide, Chlorine, Carbon Tetra-Fluoride, etc.
But this may not always be the case. It may be headed for an implant step. A nice electron beam zaps the wafer while it is laced with boron, or arsenic, etc.
burnin
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
* when cutting the ingots, people almost ALWAYS use a ring-blade; where the blade is on the inner edge of a ring larger than the ingot, and ingot is sliced. extra points for anyone who know why.**
* ingots are not always "grown." (think dipping candles) there is also a technique where you start off with a polychrystaline ingot and use localized heating to progressively monocrystalize it by localized melting. The technique is similar to one of the methods of removing impurities from iron bars.
* CMP is damn cool. I mean, it's nice and all hearing about "polish to within an atom" precision, but if you take a polished wafer, it would make the best mirror you'd ever own. Granted silicon is not the perfect reflective surface, but you won't get a mirror more accuratly shows every feature on your face. =) Otoh, when dusts and stuff DO get into the CMP machines, though, it scratches the wafer. Though you don't see it, when you trace failures on the wafer the failing gates would generally follow an arc shape (corresponding to the wafer and polishing head rotation), and from that you get the CMP machine checked out.
random junk I thought that was kinda neat.
** I used to know about 3 years ago but then I forgot. so don't expect like a correct answer or nothing.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
yea he completely skipped over the whole process of making semiconductor matirial. The silicon used it not pure silicon its doped to add impurities to change the molecular stucture of the matirial and produce the two differnt varieties of silicon semi conductor n type and p type
"That casts a chip-shaped shadow..." with a full mouth ;)
You leave some sand under your pillow and the next morning your boobs are one size bigger! If you want it bigger then repeat the cycle. You see, Dolly Parton ran this cycle for 5 days.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
I think someones processor just turned into a pile of sand!
I work in a fab and a lot of what is said in that article is wrong! 200mm - 300mm is 8 inch to 12 inch, do the math. Also, the yellow light is to keep the photoresist from getting exposed. However, that's old technology, the yellow light is no longer needed because the photoresist has moved to higher frequencies. I don't want to go on about how bad that article is, but it is.
All the ingots I've ever seen (and I live right by the Motorola Museum, free admission WOOHOO!) were dipped like caramel apples. They end up looking pretty neat when completed. Like a wierd condom.
I won't get any extra points for this becuase I'm having trouble imagining what you're saying, but if you mean the radius of the ring blade is greater than the diameter of the ingot, that's so it can slice the wafer in one clean cut.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
there are many lawsuits about birth defects and cancer from 'clean' room workers
hmm I thought my explanation is a bit inadequate.
Imagine Xena's little tossing ring thing. Xena's tossing ring thing has the blade edge on the outer edge of the ring.
reverse that, and put the blade on the INNER edge of the ring.
make sure diameter of inner edge is larger than ingot diameter.
put ingot through the center of the inner-blade ring cutter.
proceed to cut.
image here? ttp://www.atock.com/newproducts/
The inner black area is the blade. stick what you want to cut through the hole and proceed to cut.
My life in the land of the rising sun.