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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!"
It's slashdotted already so here's the poop:
1 Write out chip functions.
2 Emulate on high end computers.
3 Tape out prototypes.
4 Port Linux to new chip.
5 Send SCO US$699 per core.
Site is getting pretty doggy ... here is the obligatory link to the Google Cache
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If you didn't already know what was in the article, you shouldn't be on Slashdot.
Slashdot: News for dorks who try to pass off as nerds.
but here's the scope:
When a daddy CPU and a mommy CPU really loves each other, they get together reeeal close and...
did computation begin at conception, or at birth?
No data, no cry
Ok... so the article is not exactly new, nor interesting, so I'm gonna talk about something related :
DNA microarrays from Affymetrix, used to quantify gene expression, are built on a process inspired from CPU design (photolitography - read more about it here). 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?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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.
The author blurs sentences together like a 6 year old child might, using the same sentence construction over and over sometimes. It's certainly not a FUN read, but has some interesting info in it.
So what came first? The CPU? Or the computer that built the CPU?
Use the silicon for processors, or implants... processors, or implants...
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
I have often wondered about what exactly goes into the technology we take for granted.
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?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
So the next time you're walking on the beach, enjoying an hourglass, or making cheap, low-grade windshields, think where we'd be without ... SAND!
And of course there is always the Britney spears guide to semiconductor physics... http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
Vinge, and others, have played with this concept in a sci-fi arena, but I wonder - what happens when, to take your example, garbage men hit the wall on efficiency at disposing garbage? (This implies the whole supply chain - or perhaps I should say the removal chain - of garbage mitigation specialists hitting a limit, including recyclers, dumpers, shippers, lobbyists, specialist accountants, etc.) Inputs to the garbage industry will likely be still capable of increasing demand (or, again oddly for this example, an aspect of supply), so economics start kicking in, raising costs of disposal. With garbage, we're seeing the start of this already, and in some extreme cases, lots of noise (a certain mountain in Navada, for instance).
This has, in turn, second order effects for lots of other industries and people, and almost nobody understands the problem, other than the people who are the maxed out specialists, for a given social, technological and economic milleu. Problems, solutions and examples of poor communication and scams start to multiply.
It is fun stuff to think about, especially because I think we're getting a little close in certain areas. I hope to have a paper out on this soonish.
I forget what 8 was for.
Isn't that supposed to be a bad thing?
It's not a troll - that article was written at a 9th grade level at best. I read the whole thing looking for something interesting and there wasn't.
Ahhh sand, the building block of life...
...and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
[an old convict and H.I. lying on their prison bunks, passing the time]
Ear-Bending Cellmate :
H.I. : You ate what?
Ear-Bending Cellmate : We ate sand.
[pause]
H.I. : You ate SAND?
Ear-Bending Cellmate : That's right!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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.
Now all Intel needs is stores where you can watch the chips being made. Like a Krispy Kreme!
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...
This is one of the lamest, most oversimplified explanations I've seen in a long time. I think I read this in high school physics.
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.
Unforunatly, some processors don't work well toegther. It usually ends up as one processor is doing all the work, while the other one sits in the background doing not a damn thing. Day in and out, this processor sits on it's ass complaining about all the heat the other one is generating, when all he is trying to do is process these stupid little single thread applications, which are usually the result of the other processor (compiling is often a multi-processing task).
Eventually if things continue as they are, the two processors split in an ever growing trend in electronics of single processor systems and live in their own cases on their own motherboards. Sure, applications at times suffer, but it's for the best and they can still have visitation with both processors via a shared wireless network.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
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?
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.
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
I know that diamond cutter is used for dicing. Actually have done that personnally. Our gadget will remove about 200nm (width) silicon.
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.
First the misleading part:
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.
Tag lost or not installed.