I made my own RAM! - Micron Factory Tour

Idaho is well known around the world for chip production but here at micron's memory r d center of excellence in Boise it's a different kind of chip that gets all the attention behind me is over 200 000 square feet of cutting-edge silicon development fabrication and testing facilities and thanks to Micron sponsorship I will be bringing you guys deep under the hood not just theoretically you know very lithography much soldering Etc a key condition of my visit today was that I would be allowed to actually use the equipment and build my own ddr5 memory kit for my next system upgrade and well I'm here aren't I so let's go oh oh my goodness this is a really big parking lot Boise main site as it's known already hosts a small army of high-tech workers nearly 9 000 and many more are coming as part of a 15 billion dollar investment plan that we'll see up to 600 000 square feet of sustainable cleaner manufacturing space brought online starting in 2025 but it's raised on Dutch for today is completely different I'm about to enter Fab Four which contains many of the same incredible etching polishing and implantation machines that we saw in our Intel Fab tour the difference is that not a single wafer that comes out of these multi-million dollar machines will ever touch the hands of a micron customer that's right this entire class 100 clean room exists for the sole purpose of testing new production technique weeks that Micron can then deploy at their manufacturing centers in Taiwan Singapore Japan and Virginia they couldn't even tell me the names of some of the emerging memory technologies that they're validating in here but what I will tell you is that it's way more advanced than even the high density One beta node dram and 232 layer nand that Micron is currently shipping to customers what they were able to tell me about is that as part of the development of their upcoming one gamma and one Delta nodes they're currently installing one of asml's state-of-the-art extreme ultraviolet or euv lithography systems and euv is absolutely wild this is worth more than my car my house my office and my life one of the challenges with euv is that the wavelength of the light is so small that it gets absorbed by glass so then with lenses out of the picture asml had to resort to a system of mirrors that are manufactured to literally Atomic Precision in order to direct the light through the mask they were giving me some fun speeds and feeds for this boy apparently it weighs over a hundred and eighty thousand tons and took three 747s just to ship all the parts here for it to be assembled unbelievable now you might think then that with the right equipment manufacturing Ram is simple right I mean jadec creates a specification and assuming you've got deep enough pockets for asml's shiniest new toy you just follow the recipe right well I asked some Micron folks if that's how it worked and laughs that's fair enough I mean even ignoring the challenges inherent with building something that's never been built before a lot goes wrong when you're building nanometer scale features onto silicon and specialized tools are needed to diagnose these problems meat the UF 3000 wafer probing machine this thing is super cool our food full of dyes comes in here gets sucked into the machine aligned via the notch on one side of the wafer then slid over here under one of these guys then through a combination of Machine Vision and manual input these little tiny wires are actually lined up with the individual dies which can then be tested to ensure that they're functioning as expected spoiler alert a lot of the time they don't from this screen I can pick any die I want anywhere on the wafer say that one and the Chuck will reposition so that my probes should be exactly above the contact points on that die we can actually check this by going to uh image display change is that right and there it is you can actually see we tested this one because there are ever so light contact points from the last time those tiny hair like probes touched them that's all you need to make electrical contact with these things and find out just how well they're working once everything's aligned the engineer uses this station to run test patterns which can either reveal a fully working die or one that needs further investigation investigation that may not be able to be done automatically that's where manual probing comes in now to be clear if you're just running basic tests you would never set up at a station like this this is for deep investigations into what's going on with brand new silicon out of the Fab and there are a couple of key benefits to doing it this way one you don't tie up an auto prover for hours or days at a time and two we're actually able to probe the die even more precisely than with the auto prober so we just need to look around actually can you guys show me one of the Pico probe points yeah oh I got to zoom in I can't even see it holy crap so if we go back out are you flipping kidding me you guys already saw how small those probe pads were these are Pico probe points these will tell us not just what's happening on the i o of the die but what's happening inside the die all right you guys see this that's a Pico probe it looks like a piece of dust on the glass you're never going to see it Andrew you don't stand a chance my man wait so you guys are expecting me to land this it seems like you're setting me up to fail was that enough they started moving movie Magic we're moving over to one that they already landed for me because they were apparently expecting me to Ram the probe into the die which I did not do by the way anyway the point is this is super cool you can see this one's landed you can also see the Scribe marks that help with Machine Vision orientation and that will disappear when swamp swamp the space between the die is actually cut away it's extremely small okay my bud here is gonna try and land the Pico probe what's really cool is you don't even have to hit probe points with pico probes you can actually hit individual wires if the wafer has not been passivated yet which is like a protective layer that goes over top of it man it's amazing how big that probe looks relative to the die like what oh oh you missed you have to get the angle just right yeah down the top of it that's fine I think the people get it it's really hard now the key night among you might have noticed that this wafer on the manual probe machine here has been cut in half that's for good reason when you're working on early Parts every wafer is precious and you want as many Engineers eyes on them as possible so by cutting them in half you double the number and so on and so forth until finally as a team you've managed to find and squash all the bugs yielding a working wafer from the Fab and here it is but before we can encapsulate these dies and build them into working memory modules there are a couple more things we need to do starting with thinning you see this is too thick to build into a working memory die especially if you're stacking them on top of each other something Micron is intimately familiar with so our first step is to put it in this machine where a thin plastic protective film will be applied to the entire wafer after that our wafer gets flipped upside down onto that plastic layer and goes into the grinder as advertised it grinds our wafer down to a thickness Micron would not specify for me but suffice it to say a lot thinner and applies it to a blue sticky back piece of plastic just like this one and the reasons for this are twofold first of all is the fact that thinned Wafers tend to do what they call an Idaho Potato chipping where they curl up like this and number two is that they need a way to hold all of the individual rectangular dies in place during and after the slicing process that takes place in here with saws that have Diamond blades that are literally the width of a human hair and I'm not talking a head hair I'm talking one of the tiny little wimpy end of your finger hairs probably the most impressive thing about it is how precisely controlled it is not only does it cut all of our dies perfect on the X and Y axis it cuts to a perfect depth such that the dies are fully cut and yet still adhered to our sticky back once we reach this stage we're ready for encapsulation or packaging now obviously we can't even see some of the features on these dies with the naked eye let alone solder a wire to them so packaging is a whole other branch of black magic unto itself they don't do any of it here unfortunately but in a nutshell for a 3D product you would stack these dies thermally Bond them with Incredible Precision attach these Bond wires so that you can actually solder the bloody thing to a board then embed the whole thing in an epoxy or a mold compound so that it stays safe not just in transit but also during use you can see this one right here has actually had that mold compound sanded away so that you can see the bear dye material but this familiar plain black rectangle is what's actually going to make its way to the next stage be care characterization tester now up until now we've gone ahead and we've probed these dies to ensure that they do work as intended but that's just for show after encapsulation we should be left with the familiar black square that looks just like what you'd find on a finished memory module except that all the testing we've done on it up until now is not sufficient you see the issue with our probes is that their long leads are susceptible to signaling interference and crosstalk which means that they need to be run at a much much lower speed than what micron's customers demand so while we know that these guys work in theory we need to plug them into one of these to see if they still work at speed I'm not going to put it on this one do you guys have another one they dug me up a ddr4 load board that I can't do too much damage to at this point they also gave me a ddr4 die basically the purpose of this board is to make it much much easier to probe all the different pins on the bottom of our package to die so we put that little guy in there like that then this hold down mechanism clamps it onto the board so that we don't have to solder it and throw these away every time or de-solder them or whatever the case may be the load board then goes on to our testing table here and man I'm gonna need an explanation of exactly what it is that is going on with our Scopes here there's obviously a lot more to it but the basics are that our yellow line is our data strobe our blue is our clock and our green and red lines are input and output and what we want to see is we want to see these lines as vertical as possible I mean a theoretical perfect Digital Signal would actually have flat Peaks and valleys and straight lines between them but in the real world it takes a little bit of time to go from your low Target voltage to your high Target voltage especially when you're operating at speeds in excess of billion cycles per second another fun bit is the kind of oscilloscope that you need in order to run this kind of testing is uh worth a pretty penny this this bad boy apparently do 33 gigahertz now obviously micron's not gonna out their suppliers for their exact pricing but I've been told that this scope with probes and software and all the other bits and Bobs you might need could be in the neighborhood of a half a million dollars so to be clear this is not the kind of thing that they're running at mass production this is an r d process where you know what this kind of cost honestly compared to the equipment it took to make that one decent wafer with a couple usable dies absolutely dwarfs this of course not every issue can be diagnosed with probing that is where this x-ray machine comes in whether we're looking at an individual die or a full module this gives us a 3D non-destructive look at where our problem might lie all we have to do is load our sample onto this carrier pop it in here blast our sample with x-rays which are captured on this side while this pedestal slowly rotates generating over here this is made of lead so it's very heavy I'm just gonna be careful oh closing that generating this 3D model that's a composite of all of the individual scans so this is the PCB under here this right here is a pmic module and this right here is our solder joint and if we look closely you can see the whole thing cracked apart during a stress test that's no good what's really wild though is that's one of the lowest resolution Tools in this lab behind this door which unfortunately I'm not allowed to open are scanning electron microscopes that can go down to the gate and transistor level helping to diagnose any problems in the dyes until finally we get maybe one or two good Wafers at which stage we move to our next station but while the characterization tester tells us what an experimental design may handle the ddr6 6000 something who knows that doesn't mean that it's ready for prime time they might have just gotten lucky so the next step is to go back to the Fab and say let's run a larger batch maybe a hundred Wafers this time encapsulate those and send them over here this is a vending machine and it helps micron's Engineers figure out what the variation is with a much larger sample size I mean maybe absolutely everything that comes in here runs on target or or above but much more likely there's going to be some failed dies or other Corner cases so this machine takes in trays of packaged guys and puts them through hell intensive operations hot cold the works then the guys get sorted according to the engineer's parameters in the outputs down here some of these problems might be fixable ones you know maybe this bin could be sold as a slower part or maybe this bin has fuses that you could blow so you got a 16 gigabit die and you know half of it's fine but you just disable the other half and now it's an eight gigabit type that stuff happens all the time but when it does that's not a Prime die anymore the dies that go into micron's consumer crucial branded dims those are all going to be prime dies and on that subject I think we've actually got some here so it might be time for me to go build my laundry now that we have trays upon trays of these packaged dies that will run perfectly at their rated characteristics I am so excited right now it is time for us to build some actual modules uh not like that for that we're gonna need the machine behind me this is a multi-stage automated PCB production line very similar to what crucial might use to build the server memory modules that are powering the machine that you are watching this video from right now the first stage is silk screening which is pretty much the same process that we use to print our t-shirts on lttstore.com except instead of shirts we use what I'm informed is called a panel of memory module pcbs and okay actually this part's pretty much the same so we pop our panel down here an electronic eye detects that it's correctly placed then my lovely assistant over here presses the button normally this machine would not operate with the cover open like this and I have been cautioned to keep my hands well away from it which I will do oh there it goes wow that's really fast so you can see that there's kind of a little squeegee that's wiping solder paste shmoo it's like already done wait is it already coming out the other side oh my gosh going all the way into the other machine already we didn't even get a chance to look at it fortunately I know what's happening here this is oh not good we got a defect this is so cool I'm so glad we got a defect this machine creates a 3D computer vision model of our panel of memory sticks and you can see here it can actually detect everything from uh two contacts that are bridged like right here that would be a big problem when we soldered our chips onto it two ones that actually have too much or too little solder paste applied to them it looks like all of the errors we got were bridging errors which means we're gonna have to try again I guess or can we go in and fix it we can fix it this is more fun than I expected I've got permission to just open this up we're just gonna we're just gonna take our soon to be modules out okay so where's our is this the thing we're looking at here must be I'm just figuring this out in real time here oh yeah I see it and given that this is part of the power management of the dim I pretty much promise you this thing lights on fire and lets out the Magic Smoke the second you plug it in uh okay so what do I do now unfortunately I can't show you guys exactly what's going on here oh man am I even gonna be able to hold oh okay this is uh this is some Precision work and I can't even rest my hand on the rest of the panel so yeah okay I got one of them I think now you would never do this in mass production would you is this just for like test batches thank goodness now that I think I fixed the problem it's entirely possible that AI didn't and B I screwed up something else so I'm gonna go ahead and load this back on here let's see if we nailed it here yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes not good oh wait I never actually fixed the ones that were the defects last time I fixed something else they apparently thought it was Charming how much fun I was having so they didn't stop me but this board is bad because of that that is not something I can fix with an X-Acto Knife time for round two I asked about the solder paste they're using by the way even this stuff is cool it comes out of a refrigerated tube that is like surprisingly cold and really really heavy they won't tell me exactly what it's made of but we know for sure it isn't lead so I'm fairly certain you can eat it without dying or at least without dying of lead poisoning anyway 76 errors this time oh boy actually you know what this might not be that bad most of these look like they say insufficient solder and it's pretty clear they're probably fine I mean can I just try like can I try it as long as there's no Bridges okay so if I fix the bridges then we can go for it I mean the worst case scenario is I make my own defective memory right like it's not like you guys are shipping it to anyone final attempt and we're going forward no matter what happens here what do you think we got this all right let's try it uh okay so right I uh I click pass okay so I have overridden the machine take that machine next up is our assembly robots these helpful guys pick surface mount components off of these reels that are loaded into the bottom of the machine here and then depending on the type of component they have different heads that you can put on them so this is obviously for a very small component whereas this is for a large one and the robot knows what kind of head it has using machine vision and reading these dots on the back so it's got a little vacuum that allows it to pick up one single part and then place it onto our memory modules that's why they're more formally known as pick and place machine although I like my name too that process with the tape loaded components actually takes a few minutes because there are so many of them then when it's done we're going to pull instead from a tray of packaged dies which is loaded in over here and then the real good stuff goes on now we're ready for the last step which is basically a fancy Pizza Oven there it goes it's designed to bring our panel up to exactly the perfect temperature hold it there for a while then drop it back down heat it back up and cool it down now this isn't one of the fancy gravity defying ones that allows you to pick and place Parts on both sides using kind of like a tacky solder paste you'd be more likely to find something like that on a mass production line but the test Engineers have a pretty cool solution to their single sided oven they can actually prepare ahead of time dozens or well actually like even hundreds of pcbs that have all the little picky components on one side and then the other side's blank so all I have to do is pick and place the eight packaged dies throw them through the oven and they're ready to test this is it it's cooked but um obviously putting this into a computer is going to be a bit of a problem so they have a solution for that it's this little CNC cutter that I have not been briefed on how to use yet but it couldn't be that hard right I mean everything so far has gone in this way so surely it goes in head first and then oh well hopefully I put it in the right way okay so start I'm getting surprisingly little supervision here so I'm just doing it here we go oh this thing's sick Get Over Here Andrew okay so it goes what it goes and gets the right cutting tool or what are we looking at here it's a board gripper oh so it's got to get the right board gripper you might be doing so dims or dims or ddr4 or ddr5 okay here comes my module oh am I too close that error was caused by one of the safety checks that prevents the wrong profile from running for the kind of memory that you have so it actually reads the type of modules that are coming in and if it's got the wrong gripper bit loaded it's going to say hey whoa whoa whoa you can't do that but it's really cool that we got that error because it gave us an excuse to open up this machine and take a closer look at it from the top it's just a gripper hand from the bottom there's actually a router head that cuts off all the extra little tabs and then the gripper is going to take the finished modules and move them over to that conveyor at the back okay you guys can go ahead and close it let's run it this is cool by the way remember that video that we did on gold recovery from Electronics manufacturing back in Taiwan well this is exactly the kind of stuff that would get shipped to them to be broken down and turned back into usable materials here they are and these are ready for my computer at home no oh right I don't even know what I've built yet but before I can find out we've got one more really important stopover the long-term burn-in and validation lab they are constantly building out more capacity because you know what theoretically works is not good enough so Micron is constantly adding more real servers the exact time that their customers might put their memory in and then just absolutely pummeling these things for we're talking hundreds thousands upon thousands of hours to see what exactly could possibly go wrong ideally nothing knock on metal I'm not allowed to tell you how many server racks they have in here but let's just put it this way there's a lot of electrical panels and they're testing a lot more than just current gen and the same goes for Consumer motherboards on the wall of fame here they've got validation boards ah for basically every platform that has ever existed so that even if years down the line a customer complaint comes through they can go back to the board maker the chipset and CPU maker and work together to figure out who's causing the problem and what the solution might be what really blew my mind in this room though wasn't the environmental Chambers or the collection of old motherboards but rather the collection of weird motherboards the likes of which I'd never seen like the thing is you think Micron they probably got to collaborate with friends you think of like an Intel or an AMD or an apple but these days pretty much everything has a chip in it and every chip needs Ram so they also work with Brands you might not think of automotive knees dishwasher companies you name it it's probably got Micron Hardware in it and so there's wild stuff in here like this thing we can't show it to you obviously but it's three times the size of a standard ATX motherboard and absolutely covered in IO but I have never even heard of what even is it just because it's functional doesn't mean it's compliant it might seem like Micron is just flexing their sick three meter by three meter and achoic chamber on me because they know mine is broken but no this is an incredibly important part of the development process so we load our system or our module or our SSD or whatever the case may be onto this turntable load up an exerciser which is a program that stresses the component and the turntable spins around with this antenna here detecting the highest emissions off the product from every direction this ensures that it meets regulatory requirements and perhaps more importantly ensures that it doesn't spew radiation that could cause bit flips or other Gremlins to pop up in a given system oh on that subject by the way they also intentionally bombard their parts with Emi while monitoring for abnormal behavior or instability either of which would of course be unacceptable all right is one hell of an antenna you're compensating for something hilariously it was a real challenge to find anywhere to test my modules see the thing is ddr5 is very current and so all the ddr5 capable gear is busy having the crap kicked out of it in one of micron's testing Labs that is chock full of unreleased Hardware so we weren't going to be able to film there fortunately we found a single test bench and a quiet Corner that hopefully has working power where we are going to hook up these modules and see if we can actually post this thing This Is Amazing by the way people just like set up a test bench for you I have to set up my own test benches back at the office they're ridiculous I still have no idea what we built but they did tell me they had these guys flown in specially so maybe there's something pretty cool A2 hey we got something CPU or memory change look at that we went straight for gold and we got it did you guys test these ahead of time no we just went went for it oh wow you guys are ballsy I like it uh-oh we have 96 wait what the hell am I reading this right these are 24 gigabyte modules no one's volunteering what the hell is a 24 gig module explain yourself that's why nobody volunteered okay so how did what what now this is obvious one three three seven for the part number eight terabytes ddr9 9000 that's a missed opportunity it should have been over 9 000 obviously okay but for but for real you gotta you gotta tell them you gotta give me something to work with here so that's right now and that is why we had to bleep all of that I really am not allowed to explain this to you guys any further than these are in fact 24 gigabyte memory modules and am I am I allowed to run them like in my system is there any reason I couldn't and these are XMP oh bleep that too all right then I hope you guys enjoyed this behind the scenes look I want to give a massive shout out to Micron for making this possible this is not an easy thing to pull together and we had a ton of fun but I don't want to let that distract from the serious work that they're doing here this wall is all of the 50 000 patents that Micron holds in storage and memory and Associated Technologies this is literally the largest r d facility for memory and storage products in the Western Hemisphere and it's pretty clear to me based on seeing it that no matter what your budget is Idaho has everything you need for your next PC be it a top of the line SSD and memory kit from crucial or a literal potato these stickers are great but literally everything about them is a Lie from the part number to the fact that it says crucial on it that's their consumer brand and no consumer is ever going to touch these modules I have been specifically instructed to destroy these if I ever take them out of my computer because they were not supposed to leave this lab if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy our Intel Fab tour where we went into a little bit more detail about the actual lithography process that one's also wicked cool

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,454,529

Keywords: labs, micron, tour, facility, fab, crucial, memory, gamer, gaming, office, sever, lab, build, DIY, bts, behind the scenes, DDR4, DDR5, cool, tech, gadget, exclusive

Id: -EhDlXx3okU

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 11 2022