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The CPU: From Conception to Birth
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!"
Site is getting pretty doggy ... here is the obligatory link to the Google Cache
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
It's fairly short and pretty generalized. Lots of pretty pictures though.
A quick search on Google ("silicon fabrication introduction") turns up arguably better links.
One from SGS Thompson
A basic one from Intel
From Bell Labs
And there are plenty more.
Remember... Like I told my mom to keep her from getting the two confused:
siliCON is for chips, siliCONE is for tits!
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.
Here is a slightly better written article on the same topic...
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. 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 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.
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 arsMi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan