How CPUs Are Made As Fast As Possible

putting something together yourself can be a really satisfying experience whether it's a recipe a toolshed or of course your own PC but ordering parts from your favorite website and slotting them together is really as far as most people go I mean you can't exactly whip up a CPU from scratch can you well you can't but fortunately companies like Intel Global Foundries and tsmc do it every day but how believe it or not the main ingredient in that fancy core i7 sitting in your rig or that Snapdragon sitting in your smartphone is sand I mean it isn't exactly the same stuff that you find on the beach it's specially mined in order to be more pure than what you would make a sand castle out of and this sand is heated to thousands of degrees and chemically purified to produce a virtually flawless cylinder of silicon hence the name Silicon Valley for California's high-tech region now the reason that purity is so important is that as processor technology has continued to advance the tiny transistors on CPUs have gotten smaller and smaller so that more of them can fit on one processor die making it more powerful and because chip makers are now packing as many of these transistors as possible onto CPUs the margins for error are extremely slim making precise manufacturing and ultra clean environments absolute musts so after the silicon is purified it's cut into what are called wafers which resemble mirrors more than the cracker kind of wafer that wafer is then polished a photosensitive chemical is applied a kind of like what's used in film then ultraviolet light is shone through a stencil that's shaped exactly like the transistor layout that the engineers created for the CPU because wafers themselves are usually quite large the process of shining light through the stencil can be repeated many times fitting hundreds of CPU dies onto a single wafer after the UV light step is complete the wafer is washed and a solvent that dissolves the most areas leading a pattern that another machine edges into the way for itself these edges are then bombarded by ions charged atoms that embed themselves into the silicon changing the way that they conduct electricity to create transistors that only allow current to flow in one direction which means they can function as tiny switches or gates that make your CPU able to understand instructions which by the way you can learn more about here in fact the whole reason we use silicon as the base or processors is because of its ability to accept these ions that form the foundation for modern transistors so after these transistors are created the next step is to connect them together to make a functional processor die this is done with rigid copper interconnects essentially tiny wires that are applied on top of the transistors with a similar ultraviolet and etching process to what I explained earlier exactly how they're connected depends on what CPU architecture the engineers are using whether it be something like skylake codename skylake for Intel or codename Zen for AMD this is done in many many layers to prevent any of these wires from accidentally touching and causing a short-circuit or any other kind of defect the dyes are then tested and the good ones are placed into a CPU package and is what allows it to plug into the socket on your motherboard you add a heat spreader on top of that and voila you've got the beating heart of your new PC phone or anything else that requires a CPU but is silicon always going to be the core ingredient in the buffet of CPUs of life well because of the chemical properties of silicon actually the answer is probably no we're very close to the physical limit of how small transistors can be made on silicon meaning that we may see CPUs made from something completely different by the end of this decade but silicon will remain very useful for quite some time and besides renaming the bay area indium gallium are tonight Valley just doesn't really roll off the tongue but you 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 1,178,114

Rating: 4.9404025 out of 5

Keywords: intel, globalfoundries, tsmc, silicon, silicon valley, processor, cpu, die, wafer, clean room, photosensitive, photoresist, uv, ultraviolet, etching, transistor, mosfet, diode, instruction set, x64, x86, x86-64, core, i3, i5, i7, pentium, celeron, arm, amd, opteron, fx, sempron, apu, a-series, athlon, phenom, skylake, zen, haswell, broadwell, ivy bridge, sandy bridge, bulldozer, piledriver, steamroller, metalloid, semiconductor, heat spreader, cpu package, socket, motherboard, indium gallium arsenide, InGaAs

Id: N7ut61pSLwk

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/saloalv]

TIL AMD does not make CPUs