How Chips Are Made?

May 21

st

, 2013

Agenda • • • • • Introduction How Chips are made?

How Transistors are made?

How Chips are made?

Question and Answers

A Little Company History • • • • • Founded in July 18, 1968 by Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce Based in Santa Clara California No. of employees ~110,000 Serves ~Worldwide Products: Bluetooth chipsets, flash memory, microprocessors, motherboards chipsets, and network interface cards

A Little Chip History • • • • First chip built in 1971 called Intel® 4004 processor Initial clock speed: 108KHz Transistors: 2,300 Manufacturing technology: 10 micron

42 years later

• • • • In 2012 3rd generation Intel® Core™ processor Initial clock speed: 2.9GHz

Transistors: 1.4 billion Manufacturing technology: 22nm

How Chips Are Made? From Sand to Silicon • Sand: • 25% silicon • 2 nd frequent chemical found on earth • Base ingredients for semiconductor mfg • • • • Melted Silicon Wafer level ~300 mm/12in Purified through mfg/chemi process to electronic grade si, 1 ailen atom/one billion si atom The crystal Product results in mono crystal called Ingot • • • Mono-crystal Si Ingot Electronic Grade si Weights 100Kg, with purity 99.9999%

Ingot Silicon Cutting Cut into individual si discs called wafer Polished to flawless surface

UV Exposing • • Applying Photo (print) resist A thin/even Blue liquid , photo resist finish, is poured to make a layer • • • •

Just like what happens to film material in a film camera when you press the shutter button When photo exposed



Soluble The exposure is done using circuit masks pattern Each die on each wafer contains millions of transistors

• • • • • • How A transistor is made?

What is a transistor?

A transistor acts as a switch, controls the flow of electrical current Intel makes 30m of them on the head of a pin Washing Off of Photo Resist The liquidly photo resist is dissolved by a solvent, revealing patterns made by mask finish, is poured to make a layer • • • Etching (Cutting) & Removing Photo Resist Extra material is cut, but photo resist is left Photo resist is removed by chemicals and desired shape becomes visible

• • How A transistor is made?

Applying Photo resist The area is exposed to photo resist material so should not get ions implanted. Ions are electrically charged atoms, +/- electrons • • Ion Implantation To increase conductivity, ions are added (doped) at very high speed to wafer (300,000 km/hr) • • Removing Photo Resist The green material is the doped material with alien atoms implanted

• • • • How A transistor is made?

Ready Transistor Insulation layer (magenta) is added Three holes are dogged & filled copper The filled copper is used to connect to other transistors • • • Electroplating The si wafer is put into a copper sulphate The copper ions travel from positive terminal (anode) to negative terminal (cathode). This is called electroplating • • After Electroplating On the surface the copper ions settle as a thin layer of copper

• • How A transistor is made?

Polishing The excess material is polished off.

How Chips Are Made? From Sand to Silicon • Metal Layer • Transistors are placed next to each other according to design/architecture • • Metal layers are created to wire between transistors Chips are made of several different wire layers, just like a multi-layered highway • • Wafer Sort Test Functional test are run through each chip, test response is compared to the right answer. If no correct answer, debug or scrap

How Chips Are Made? From Sand to Silicon • • Wafer Slicing The wafer is cut into pieces of passed (good) dies

Chip Diagram

How Chips Are Made? From Sand to Silicon • • Individual Die An individual die cut through slicing • • Packaging The substrate, the die and the ehatspreader are put together • • Processor Complete process