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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.
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
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.
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.
And of course there is always the Britney spears guide to semiconductor physics... http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
So technology developed for CPU is helping to find cures for diseases, increase our knowledge of life... etc. Isn't cool?
That depends. Can you overclock it?
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.
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.
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