While it’s nice to just look at the finished product itself, sometimes it’s useful to go back and look at how it’s made. Especially today in the silicon industry, where both major players in the x86 desktop market are having issues with their top end products. Another large member of the industry, IBM, is also finding the going at 90nanometer a lot harder than they predicted. Today on Sudhian, we’ll take a look at just how a processor goes from essentially sand to a fully functioning integrated circuit, and all the steps in between.
There is a ton of good info in that article. It’s definitely worth checking out.
A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Check also the other HW,tons of info on that page.Thx alot!
Enjoy!
That was a really good article! I have always wondered how the CPU is created.
For those us of that didn’t get EE degrees, there’s a book called “Code: The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735611319/qid=109959…
(No, I don’t get a kickback), that start off with general principles of electricity, to transistors/logic gates/boolean logics/adders, up to assembly languages of intel and motorolla processors. It presumes no previous knowledge of electronics or programming.
Nice article, I absolutely don’t understand it, but it made me wonder what an achievement the processor is. Imagine silicon and the process of exposing to light (hte part about masking) resulting in a small processor that can do so much, is programmable. You never stop to think about this, we all take it for granted, and if you understand the process maybe you’re not so impressed, but I am!
If only there were more pictures to illustrate the process.
Totally agree. It’s all the more remarkable when you consider the odds of failure for just a single transistor.
The modern processor is a triumph of human perserverance and ingenuity against the laws of chance.
Not a bad article nice refresher. Even despite the complexity of the process i still think most processors are over-priced.
“If only there were more pictures to illustrate the process.”
Well, i think taking a picture of the process would end up destroying the process. But there is infared film you can use to take pictures in the dark.
After reading it twice, I understand much more than I previously knew about the manufactoring process of CPUs. This was a very informative article. It’s amazing that each one of the stencils used to create a layer requires 10 GB of data; that really gave me an idea of how truely complex a CPU is.
“Finally, certain parts of a processor may not function properly. If this area is in the cache (which takes half or more of a CPUs die area), some times it can be routed around and masked off. This means you can still sell the CPU for a profit, just as a Celeron or Sempron with less enabled cache onboard.” hehe ;-p
Neat, but somehow I thought it was a bit on the simplistic side. Me being a hardware geek is starting to show I guess.
Really nice article, I’m recommending it to my friends.
Specially the part about binning, amazing, I heard something about that, bu I was sure CPU’s where build from ground up to meet a given clockrate…