Livestream Webinar: Semiconductors, An Introduction

foreign [Music] I've been a roboticist almost all my life now I think engineering is just as creative as the Arts Engineers we solve problems it impacts the world it makes a difference without IEEE I don't think I would have the network that I have anyone can get involved with IAA USA at any time there's an immense amount of value for anyone at any career stage good afternoon everyone and welcome to another I triple USA live stream webinar semiconductors an introduction I'm your host Jonathan Cho actually USA's goal is to create programming that is valuable relevant and of interest to you as such we will be sending a short survey to all registrants after this event and we would love your feedback we value your opinions and it would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and share your thoughts are presented for today's webinar is Kathy Herring Hayashi Kathy has been involved in the semiconductor industry her entire career developing deploying and analyzing Advanced software tools used to create computer and mobile phone chips at Unisys she was on the team that created one of the first Sperry mainframes on a chip using custom software she has since worked for Cadence Design Systems and centricity a local startup she now works at Qualcomm working with Semiconductor workflows in large scale compute environments excuse me Kathy also currently serves as the IEEE director of region six is a member of the IEEE board of directors is a senior member of IEEE and IEEE Ada Kappa new Honor Society without further Ado I'll now pass it off to our presenter welcome Kathy we're very excited for what you have for our audience today thank you Jonathan it's great to be here so today what we're going to be talking about is semiconductors and what I'm going to be doing is giving a very high level introduction so no we're not going to go into a lot of the deep technical background we only have an hour after all but I do want to hope that you'll understand a little bit more about the semiconductor industry how the semiconductor chips are made so let me just talk about the agenda for before we get started so we're going to talk about what is semiconductors we'll just start with the basics and then I'm going to give you some high level overview of making a chip and I'm hoping to give you just enough information so that you'll understand the basic flow and then want to go down and learn more about the different areas we're then going to talk a little bit about the ecosystem Workforce the the workforce that is making the chips and some steps that we can do in order to work to keep diversity within technology and then last we're going to do a review and we're going to go over some of the topics and I hope that after all of these slides that you'll start to feel a little bit more comfortable with some of the terminology that I'm using and we'll be able to talk a little bit more about semiconductors and I hope that you start to get a better understanding of this world of semiconductor technology so let's get started one of the first things that we have to understand is what is a semiconductor so semiconductor if you look at the word that second word is Conductor and it is the ability to conduct electricity and so you conduct and you insulate electricity and it is these electrical properties that we're able to harness and able to do quite a bit now when we're making computer chips there's a lot of different kinds of chips there could be Memory digital RF analog or fpgas in the industry that I'm in I've been worked in digital for quite a while so hence you see the ones and zeros but when you have to you're able to harness the power of electricity you're able to control ones and zeros control logic and control transistors and you can make amazing things happen by being able to use these semiconductor materials now one of the most popular semiconductor materials is silicon so we'll hear a lot about silicon so whenever something has those properties it's called a semiconductor material okay so let's go to the next part so we understand what semiconductors are there's something to do with conducting electricity so then what's the next thing is what's a chip so a chip is an integrated circuit and if you get a bunch of these integrated circuits and you're able to put them on that semiconductor material and that's what we've said in the glass slide it's usually silicon then we can start making a little logic and transistors and we can start making things happen with the chip and the more Logic the more transistors the more components that we put on a chip the more that it will be able to do okay so as you hear a lot the semiconductors often refers to the industry of semiconductors and ships well let me show you what a chip really is and then I'll tell you how it's often used so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a picture at the very bottom here you'll see like a printed circuit board so if you open up the back of the computer you'll often see that board and on that board there's all these different devices well some of those are devices that have computer chips in them so I'm going to show you a little graphic now I found this um it's a short video on LinkedIn but I'm just going to show you some Snippets and the link is there but I'm going to show you some of the pictures now this is an old package and if you take the back off the package and then you can see here they're taking a something to open it up in the back and they're starting to take the back off and then underneath that you'll find something in there and it's almost like finding a pearl there's a little die underneath that and underneath that if you start zooming in you'll see the integrated circuits and then after that you can actually see some of if you use I collect on microscopes you can actually see the transistors and things underneath it so this is important for a couple reasons so number one this these things on the left is the package it's the we assemble things into a package we call it package assembly and you take this die and you put it in a package and then you put the package together and then you can ship a part okay now the die itself is it starts in the bottom you'll see a circle and that's usually a semiconductor wafer and when you have the semiconductor wafer we'll often repeat the pattern several times then we'll take a saw and we'll chop it up until it's a little square and it's a little silicon chip and the Silicon chip is then what you would put into a package and then serve as a product now the reason why this is important now this is kind of an old chip that's okay but what I want to do is show you the difference between a die and a package because right now there's amazing things that are going on in the packaging world of semiconductors and they're doing many things like here we've got one die they're doing stack die they're doing many different Innovations in the package and assembly world so I want you to understand there is a package and assembly and they're doing many creative Innovative things so I hope that you watch out for them and what they're doing in innovation in that space and then there's also the die now the foundries or Fabs create the die that go in the package that go into the park okay so hopefully we know a little bit more about the package the die and the circuit okay so now that you know all the pieces um how do we make an overall chip so let me show you very high level how a chip might be made so now you already know some of the pieces let's put it all together so it's kind of a trick question when I ask people it's like what how do we make a chip and a lot of people say you know you start with a transistor you start with the package you start with a die but actually the truth that matters you start with the market demand you need to find out what you want this chip to do and you need to find out not only what you want it to do today but also there take some time to make chips so it may be what you're going to be doing in six months it maybe do something that you know in a year so you have to understand what the technology is today and also when you're making the chip itself so a lot of things are in the market demand you need to understand the technology you need to know the marketing of the vertical that you're in and a lot of these times you will start and create a requirements for what you want to do so you have basically a requirement stock that will say what you want that chip to do so you start with looking at the technical landscape and then determining what you're going to make and then you design the chip now the design in the chip is on that last side when you saw all those intricate things through electron microscope people have to take that idea that market demand and whatever you're going to make try to make the pattern and um that the Chip is going to have on it and then once you create that you create a blueprint and then you pass that blueprint to a Fab and the Fab will manufacture it so they'll take your design they will manufacture it and produce this chip that has your design on it and then as we saw in the past picture it will then put it in a package and assemble it right and then after you package and assemble then it will go into a system integration so it will like go on the board or go into the device whatever you're trying to put it in and then you can deliver the product okay very high level each one of these represents a significant amount of time thousands of people billions of dollars but this is kind of the way that you can look at it from just a very high level Okay so figure out what you're going to make design the chip manufacture that little piece put it in a package and assemble it integrate it with the rest of the system and then deliver the product okay so it it is definitely not that easy so let me show you a picture of what it really looks like this is a picture from the Accenture and they may have a really great document called harnessing the power of the semiconductor value chain if you're interested in learning more please access that it's a wonderful document but in this is just showing the global nature of semiconductors and how it goes across the world and accomplishes those things that we just said so there could be one place where you've decided that you're going to make the chip but then you may need some external IP and that's going to be located somewhere else and they're going to deliver the external IP then there's someone else that's going to design the front end of the Chip And then there might be another team that's going to verify the the ship itself and then do the physical design each one of these can be teams around the world and there could be thousands of people working on this chip so then once you have the physical design then you're going to send it to a Fab which could be in another location and have them manufacture the chip then you take it to another location and have it assembled put in that package and then you'll send it someplace else to get tested and then make sure that the final project is delivered but to kind of take that from our very simple View and I understand it's a really simple view this one is getting closer to showing the global reach and the amount of people that are involved in creating that chip it's a very complex process and it is um I hope that you learn more and need to go in each one of these circles and understand each part of this and what they call this is the global semiconductor value chain and um that is all the things that are required in order to make it shift now what we're going to do here is um I am going to go back to the to the very simple picture here but understand there's so much more underneath it but again I'm trying to do this in a little over an hour a little under an hour and so we talked about the market demand let's now delve into the second one the second one is designing the chip itself now personally this is where I spent most of my career is in this chip design so basically we were given requirements and then we're going to create the design once we're done we're going to send something to a Fab and have it manufactured okay so that's the piece that we'll look at now there's various types of chips there's memory chips there's digital there's RF and there's fpga and what I'm going to focus on is the digital design flow however each one of those others have their own design flow so let's go into what is a design flow so we've got the requirements and now we need to make a computer chip so how how do you even start so I want to take some of the mystery away from that so that you can at least say you've seen it once on how a chip is made and how a chip is designed now these next couple slides I had the honor of getting them from Karen bartelsen and Carol barterson was the former president of IEEE several years ago and she worked at synopsis which is a large Eda company and they're very large and very instrumental in some of the innovations that are occurring in semiconductors so they write software and the software that's used and there are many software companies and even open source software companies that are used in order to create a design so one of the ways is just give you a workflow of how chips are designed and this is from Karen's deck and so these are all the steps that you take to design a chip and there they are now if I go through each one it'll take quite a bit of time but basically if you look at the top at the very top it says specification yep that's the first thing that we get in and at the very bottom there's something called a gds2 which is what we call the it's a file that's the output that is sent to the manufacturer to the Fab to be manufactured okay so we already know the front and we know the end but I'm going to just make this even more high level so what we're going to first do is we're going to do a logical implementation what does that mean so you have the requirements and we're understanding let's say that they asked us to make a calculator so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to write down the logical requirements for a calculator so let's say that my calculator takes two inputs and so it has two numbers and it has an output which would be one number and so the way that I would describe this calculator is it has two inputs one output and its function is to add the two numbers so given the number two and the number two I would expect four is an output so there we've described The Logical implementation of a very simple calculator or adder so once you have the logical definition then we're going to verify it and one of the things that I've learned through CAD tools is that we're always verifying and you're going to see that through the many steps that we go to we'll make the logical and then we'll test it does two and two still equal four yes okay and then we'll change it into a different format does it still equal four yes and then we'll change it into physical two and two still four yep good and then you put it in the die we'll check still two and two for you yep and then you put it into the package and then you make the part and guess what at the very end I'm still asking it is two and two still four so verification happens throughout the design cycle we in in design houses or engineering design houses where they make this there's usually large compute grids and in one study that we showed several years ago sixty percent of all the jobs were verification flows and that was just making sure somewhere along the line that the the the chip is functioning the way that you expect it function so after you've got the definition and you've transformed it several times you've verified that it's still doing what you want it to do then we start translating it into physical so what that means is that we're starting to do yes taking the logic we're going to make some gates out of it we're going to make schematics and then we're going to make physical in the way that the Fabs would understand so Fabs tell us if you want to make a transistor this is what you have to do this is what your transistor looks like and so we put transistors all over the place in the manner that the Fab needs it and that's the physical there's also several techniques especially from when this side deck was made of dfn we designed for manufacturing and what we're trying to do is always make sure that we're making chips that work very important um one thing that I can go ahead and mention now is that when we make this chips one of the things that we're looking for is to make sure that the chips have yield that make sure that they're working so let's say that we made 100 chips and 70 of them work and 30 of them don't it's a complex process so I'm not really expecting it always to be in the high numbers because one little dust spec is going to ruin the whole thing or if a design rule got too close it could ruin it so getting 70 to 100 or 70 out of 100 that is a those are good you like higher numbers especially in more mature processed notes but you'll get high numbers so the yield is 70. it means you're doing quite well but if you're doing a new process note or something else you might get fewer yield you might just get 10 out of 100 working but that's okay you got 10. that's great you can test and you can start doing things and you can use that to improve the yield as you go along and if you can improve the yield or you if your numbers are not what you need you just need to make more and it could be more expensive but you could still get the information I'll yield is important because when you ask afab is it yielding is your design yielding those are important things to know so now you know yield too all right so here we've got the different pieces of Designing the chip let me show you one more picture of how to design the chip and then we won't go too far past that okay this is just a high level of what each step looks like so remember I was showing you um that you start with the The Logical and the physical and then the output these are not related I'm just giving you graphical representations of what they are so the first thing you're going to do is when you're designing a chip remember I have a spec and then I'm going to write down what is I'm going to do then there's several programming languages that are called RTL and the registered transistors and what they allow you to do is specify and here you can see inputs and you can see outputs I'm not sure this is it says it's a counter but you've got inputs and you've got outputs so for mine I would say input of you know a and input of B and and the output would be you know C and then we're going to add them okay now the only difference between RTL and your traditional computer programming languages is computer programming languages are logical you go from the top and you go to the bottom and it's very logical what it will do and RTL it's actually time based so you're going to go from you're going to put the one down on the input and then you're going to clock it and go to a register and it's going to hold right and if my one got to the right place and my other one got to the right place then the adder is going to say yep one and one I'm going to Output a 2. but if it's too slow and I my chip is too slow to get there then I clock it and my one didn't get there in time and if it didn't get there in time then the adder didn't know that I wanted to add that and then um it didn't you know it won't get the right value so clocking and timing is very important so when you do these designs it's clock driven and that's what it's all about is running it through we do timing analysis we do all sorts of things with the timing because that is the way that these programming languages look at it okay and so if it gets there in time it's great if it's slow um it may not be have the right results we got to figure out how to make it faster and there's there's techniques for doing that or if it got there too fast hey maybe I could have done even more so we could even change the timing on it as well okay so um that's what the the timing is for RTL so now we have tools okay now that I've described it now I start using tools and the tools that will do Behavior structure synthesis so we're going to synthesize it so we're going to use software tools to make Gates and transistors this is actually a pretty bad big picture of the gates but um that was all I could find at the moment so it goes into what ands and ORS remember that Boolean logic this is where that all comes into play so it is able to take this logic and understand that when you said Adder this would be the gates that would be associated with it and there's a lot of things that we could do to make sure that we get the right Gates we might even have a module called an adder and then you get the gates now once you do that and of course we're testing again making sure everything's ready then we start going and we run additional tools to now tell us how to get the physical design now these physical designs here they're they're actually um many different layers and there's interconnect which is routing things and there's modules that are doing some logic so a lot of times I call this layout and routing and in layout and routing you would it's actually very interesting problems if you had all the modules and you need to figure out where do I place them so that they will be optimally rounded so I can actually place things in fact there's some games out there today that if you place the circles and you try to Route them if you don't place them in the right places you can't route between them right so layout's important and then the ability to route in between and once you have all of your modules placed and everything routed and then we've put them in designs that the Fab understands the Fab tells us what the distance between these needs to be what design result rules that we need to follow and then we run a lot of tests to make sure that all those rules are followed and again we test it to make sure that but it's still like if I'm my Adder that 2 and 2 still equals four then when we're done you had another tool that will output gds2 now we have different databases and there's different database types that we can use GDs has been here since the days of Kalma for those who've been in the industry a long time but it's just a right now they're very large files that have directions for manufacturing and those are sent to the Fab to be created okay now in technology moves fast and so some people in the industry like myself have actually done all of this at the very early part of our careers because it was the designs were small enough and we could actually use tools and if you're interested in what I did for a career I wrote my the company that I'm with so it was a large company and it had its own prototype Fabs and that's the way we used to do it is that they were large companies they had their own Fabs we designed our own Hardware description language and I wrote the parsers and the um the language itself and the parsers that went with the RTL which are Hardware description languages I wrote Behavior to structure synthesis tools to put it into Gates and then I wrote layout tools that actually did that where you could interactively place your modules and then I helped debug some of the networking in between it so back in the day we could actually do all of this today we have external the the RTL languages are standards across the industry thanks to accelera and IEEE and the we have companies which are called Eda companies that provide the tools to parse it and do the behavior to structure synthesis and they do amazing jobs so we have whole companies doing that in fact the group that I was in was acquired by a cad company because that's now moving the things that we were doing in-house were now done in CAD companies so there's Eda companies they're CAD software companies um and they would do the translation from synthesis and then physical design they would also be doing that there's companies that are just doing specific areas and all this testing there's companies that do the types of testing and there's a whole thing about putting testing in the circuits itself so much much more but hopefully I've got you thinking about the ways that you can start there's so much more in each one of these and I'm not doing it justice by um but I'm hopefully giving you the very high level that hopefully you'll want to know more what is an RTL what does it look like what are these Gates what are the tools used in Gates how do you test how you design for tests how you design for manufacturing um and what does what does this GDs file look like and why is it so big okay so very high level but I encourage you that it's doable and if you if you learn how to do it it's actually quite fun some of these puzzles and the graphics and I think nothing is prettier than looking at the physical design in fact there's whole books on art for physical design okay so that is how a chip is made so very high level and here's some more um I just like the diagram because it was it was looked good but it was correct in the SEC that we do chip specification functional verification synthesis DFT design for test that's what we call the front end so that's stuff that we did on the left that's the front end of the design and in the back end we start doing that floor planning we start working with the clocks do a PNR place and Route and then you do final verification and output for the gds2 so hopefully as you see this at least some of these terms might be a little bit will pop out a little bit and when someone says I do everything from RTL to gds2 well look at that they're doing everything between here and here so it means when they say their arterial to GDs that means they're not the packaging side they're not the Fab side they're probably not the marketing side but their implementation of the chip design and they've actually told you quite a bit about what they do so now we know what RTL is and we know what gds2 and a lot of people that takes different skill sets to do the different things in here now and I got this from hopefully I've got the links to wherever I got things on the um sides and if not it's in the references at the back but there's so much more um and we could go on and on about the entire ecosystems choir for chips um but I like I said before in the Global Systems we use third-party IPS we use Eda tools and there you see written that's the um you know the very large companies or open source that is tools used to do all that magic that we just saw compute environments large compute grids are used in order to um to do all this processing that we're talking about Hardware security so important both Hardware security and the IP Hardware security the IP disaster resiliency making sure that everything is redundant IP security again both in the chip Hardware chip and the IP itself and we need project managers we need data governance we need documentation and if you're an automotive or certain verticals you need additional functionality for like functional safety so if you're working on automotives I want to make sure that that chip just doesn't stop in the middle of the road there's redundancy there's a things that you can do so that you will make sure that the chips will always perform it may run in a degraded state but it will run in so that you can get off the road so there's a lot of functional safety redundant systems and extended life cycles um so sometimes if you're making a iot device or you know they're very they have shorter lifespans and then if you've got a phone a couple years lifespan but for an automotive it's 15. so when you're designing these things you have to keep the life cycles in in mind okay so much to think about that's a lot but hopefully we'll get started and I hope that you're starting to think about um you know there are some things that we're going to pick up and some things what will resident resonate with you but hopefully you're starting to understand a little bit to demystify what semiconductors is all about so Market demands or requirements chip design is RTL to gds2 where we start with something that looks like a programming language we iterate several times until we get something like a gds2 to send to the Fab and then from the Fab we will manufacture the part so before we send it to the Fab I'm going to ask you a couple questions about that chip design that you just created okay and that will determine what we're going to be doing in the Fab so bear with me a second we're going to lead we if you have your chip and then now you're going to manufacture it let's review what you just created honestly some of this stuff is happening very big at the very beginning before you've even created the chip but let's just say that you've seen the chip and now that we have it but a lot of this is determined when you do the market demand all right this is a wonderful wonderful picture of this from again the same report from Accenture I just love it because for those of you in the industry this is Moore's law but this is Moore's law with a phone in front of it so first of all for those who haven't seen more Moore's Law Moore's Law it started like in the 70s um and you always hear um you know this is the end of Moore's law but Moore's law said that we would double the number of transistors in a circuit every two years and there was actually another caveat on the bottom that said it would also be lower cost so I didn't see that on there but that was also another constraint but let's just talk about the doubling of transistors way back when when you had um transistors I wish I could have told my future self you know that you know it's gonna it's there was gonna be amazing amount of transistors because at the time when we were asked to double it we thought that oh that's a lot of work oh I'm gonna have to double it we're gonna rerun the whole thing with new design rules um but what it would do is that when you doubled it you've added so you've got the silicon and you've got the chips and transistors in there right so they they figured out how they can do this through a manufacturing process so you've got all these chips that are on you know all these transistors that are on chips okay so at the beginning we could make enough that was like a phone it's kind of like my calculator example I could do an addition right this was a phone that could pretty much do phone things but then if you keep doubling the number of transistors every year so we're able to shrink it a little bit we're able to put little design roles in it and we understand oh we can put more transistors in the same area oh we can put even more look at the number of logic that you're adding each time so now you're able to do even more with each new chip so here's a phone that has a little bit more functionality and then these get you know look it's got even got a nice little display starting to come up here and then look at the phones of today and that's because we were able to put significant amount of what we're calling transistors or logic and then it could do more things and so this is Moore's law and in my career I can safely say that every year we always waited for the manager to show us this picture and I think every single year we were shown Moore's Law now if Moore's Law flattens off that doesn't mean that there isn't still innovation in fact it's a wonderful time in semiconductors because what we were measured on before was the number of transistors in a circuit and our goal every year was to double that number and that's what we're laser focused as an ecosystem so it was not only the people that were dying designing the chip it was the Fabs and the assembly everybody was focused on this one goal and it was amazing because by everybody being focused on the same goal of doubling the number of transistors look it was able to do amazing things right that is amazing so um so even though it may have leveled off there's other Innovation going but the Innovation may be in other things that will still allow us to increase the capabilities you're going to see things like stack die you're going to see a different packaging you're going to see many other Innovations but it may not just be a number of transistors so just a side note on that all right here we go so now that we've got your chip and we understand that there's a lot of uh there's a lot of um transistors on it I'm just going to very briefly I'm checking the time here um talk to you about power performance area because that is one of the main things when you're designing a chip and why is that important well I think uh in community so let's talk about these six different verticals that are very common when you're making computer chips so one vertical is Communications so that will be your phone okay and the other one are PCS and computers this laptop that I'm looking at automotive car in the garage uh consumer consumer goods industrial and government okay those are probably your top six places that semiconductors will go now in each one of these one of the main things that we're looking at is power performance and area and you actually know what they are even though you may not have heard those terms before so when Communications in Mobile phones you want your battery to last so you you care about the power usage of this phone and so you want the power to be optimized so that I don't have to keep recharging it all the time performance I want to make sure that my games run very efficiently so you want performance in there and an area I want to make sure that it's small enough so it fits in my purse and I get good you know it's it's small enough right so you care about power performance and area and on a phone all of those have to be optimized and also we care also about cost that's another parameter you can add in there for a computer my laptop it it's hooked up into the into um you know the power cord here so it has it has a little bit more leniency on the power performance I want the same performance or better an area yeah I still want a thin computer but we got some room here and then keep thinking along those lines with each one of these like for automotive I got a huge battery in there for power I do want performance and in addition I want functional safety an area yeah like you know there's some places we could put some of these chips and things so think about that across each vertical and that's power performance and area and cost and you can look at each one of those so also what you're going to look at is why is that important and why is she bringing that up because the power performance and area that you're looking for is going to be determining the process node how many what process you're going to be using to create the chips and it also we want to know how many you want to make so for phones we're going to make quite a few because replaced every three to five years Automotive I'm not sure how often they're being replaced but they're a longer time than the phone so the quantity may be different and schedule when do you need it so there's a lot of different parameters that um a lot of different parameters based on your vertical and your power performance area needs okay so how does that all come together well this is another um so this one is actually I want to give credit to this is from the SI um semicutical industry Association um article as well they have a really great document and and this is from them again this will be in the references okay so let's talk about process notes in order to get the the PPA that I'm looking for I need to find the right process nodes so the process node is the process the technology that the Fabs use to manufacture it okay see I was leading to Fabs I was going somewhere with this so here's another uh great this is from the Accenture document that talks about a car and inside the blue those are um the advanced notes those are the latest and greatest they're going to be fast they're looking to optimize PPA but then also look there's other ones that are purple and so we call those mature nodes they may have been around for a while that we've been using them in industry and so that those processes might be known a little bit more so depending on what your goals were will depend on how you want them manufactured so when you go to a Fab you're going to ask them what process nodes they're going to Target and that will be which chips that they will be Manufacturing in in those in their lines okay so if they bring if a Fab brings up um some older and and just so that we can get an idea of what process nodes are I'm just going to read from here uh this one for like the CPU is six nanometers and Below okay and then if you're going for some of the oil coolant it's 90 nanometers and above so that's how we talk about the process nodes okay so we have advanced nodes which are going to be the latest and greatest and this one says 60 nanometers and below and mature nodes which are 90 nanometers and above so when you have a Fab you're going to say are you going to do mature notes or Advanced notes and then that'll tell you what kind of chips they're going to manufacture and oh by the way what verticals might be be more interested than others now granted quite a few chips in a car quite a few chips in a phone so when the the verticals may be looking for a lot of different chips maybe you want to use a lot you know different faps for different Chips To Go in different areas but now you know a little bit more about Fabs and process notes okay so the first thing to ask the Fab is what process node are you and then we can understand where we're going to get this manufactured okay all right so that brings us up to a Fab so if you know um what process nodes you are and um so it's not like I can pick the one that's local to me I need to pick the one that's going to be able to manufacture the part that I need at the cost I need at the schedule that I need right so remember those other parameters so that's where the semiconductor Fab comes in now there's some great videos out there on manufacturing I can safely say there were zero videos that I saw that were as cool on the design side but on the Fab side there's quite a few and I'm just going to let this one run in the background but if you if you Google inside the making of an Intel chip and there are others there are other Fabs that talk about how to make a chip there's really some cool things this is showing on Sand becoming silicon which is one of the substrates for the semiconductors right so this is showing it being created and they're going to take it and then they're going to pull it and so I'll let you watch that as it goes through um this is about a seven minute video so that um you can go watch it and there is some dialogue as well so they're gonna pull this thing up right that's this that's the sand going into silicon and then once they pull it out then um let's see if they get to that part they're going to start slicing it into Wafers right and when they slice it into waves up at the top left you see a wafer right and there those Wafers are what we're going to do the semiconductor process on and on that wafer we're going to put um you see there's a wafer we used to use those as mirrors back in the day you can't do that anymore but that they um use the this the wafer and then we're going to put that design that the design Engineers gave us and we're going to use masks and uh lithography and various um we're going to put different uh coatings on it and lithography and etching and doping and all sorts of things you can watch some of these and watch How It's being created okay a very delicate process it it can't be disturbed it can't get you know there can't be any Motion in the room there can't be any dust in the room um they're not even handled by humans um they're they're put in these carriers and sent robotically from one place to another so it's just a fascinating process um please understand this is really fascinating creating the designs is cool too um but then when you're um making the chip it's actually a very cool process so in order to understand this there are people there that understand device characterization they understand physics we understand um you know how things work together lithography was a big thing I used to tell people that how do you make a chip and I used to say well it's like when you're making a when you're making a photograph and you're putting it in different chemicals and the photograph pops up but most people don't know that anymore so it's that's not a good example anymore um but it's you make a mask you shoot light through it you put you know and use it as a template to go so I don't want to that my I have a very simplistic view of it but please watch the videos and uh there's a lot of discussion and you can this is a whole industry amazing and that is the thing with semiconductors it's just amazing how this all works and comes together so someone started with a document about what we wanted to make and then we had whole design teams that actually designed it and these out of this world manufacturing places are just are making it right um so that is why the semiconductor industry is is so interesting and interesting to me um because I I will not always whenever I get a new phone and especially if it might have been a phone that I was at all involved in when you turn it on the first time and it works and then I bring up my favorite game favorite game works and just to think about all the things that went into bringing it to you and it it works and that's because throughout this whole cycle there's so there's um I like to say magic but it's not magic it's very designed that we design it we check it design it check it and then amazing manufacturing Fabs like these that are able to take those designs and then to make it so when you actually get these um you know you get a device and turn it on just think about all the things that happened uh as in order to make it happen but that what you've seen now is the basic process for making that happen so please uh watch the rest of this chip and the rest of this video it does have audio on it so when you go to watch that and there's another good one here that flips through it it goes through basically these steps and processes here and this is from the the documents that I'll reference in a little bit um but there's your there's your wafer and then you slice the die and then you um then go back to that first slide where we put it in the package and assembly but believe me there's testing all along the way so there you have it that that is how a chip has made and I hope that you have taken away some of the little mystery but still leave you in a little bit of awe of how this is made um because um now I hope that you're asking a lot of questions and you want to know more um so hopefully I'll give you enough resources to get started so to continue on um some of the things that we also want to talk about is the workforce and so from this I hope you see that this ecosystem is huge um and it's depending on where in this process that you want to dive in but when I was talking about the very front we need marketing people technical analysts uh engineering technologists to look at the future right just in that that box alone and then the other one where we're designing chips we need people that understand um that are very good at logic and statistics in fact um I had a larger class and that was one of my favorite classes and probably the one that I think came in the most useful here is because you have so many logic problems um and they are problems that you work to solve and they're a lot of fun so people that are designing the chips people are verifying the chips people that know physics people that know um how the the physics of the transistors being created but we also need people that understand the compute environment because this takes an enormous amount of compute and it has to be optimized for the semiconductor industry because we can't just use any computer but we need to use computers that are optimized that have the storage that fits the designs that we're trying to do the displays the displays many of the displays that we're using came out of the gaming industry because we were looking for the displays that were fast and and had low latency and can be used in across from across globally right so the displays that when you're looking at a chip and you're zooming in and we need amazing displays so I hope that you see that throughout the ecosystem there are there is a need for so many different types of people and skills and I hope that as we start looking at the workforce that we'll be looking at a lot of those so one of the questions that we have is as we're looking at uh the the workforce for the ecosystem let's make sure that we are looking for the diversity in everything that we do and there's several strategies that many large companies have done that are very successful and I applaud each and every one of them and they're thankful so some of the things that they're doing to support a diverse Workforce um and so some things I'm going to name just a few of them but there's a list in fact if you look at the chips ax documents they even describe even in more detail some of the things that for diversity that we have in many large corporations but hopefully we can get to many more areas as well the first one is near and dear to my heart it's called returnship programs and returnship programs are for those that need to leave the industry for whatever reason so if you need to raise a child or take care of Elders or you're going to the military or for whatever your reason is that you need to leave the industry but welcome them back welcome them back after one year welcome them back after 10 years welcome them back after 18. so the returnship programs are those that want to re-enter the industry now you still have to apply for the job and usually their internship positions but generally paid internship positions and you will get a mentor and the mentor will look at where you left the industry what it looks like now and hope to fill you in on the Gap so that you can be productive and engaged in the technology as it is today so for example um one internship program is that person came back and they said well where's Skype it's like oh we don't use Skype we use teams so uh found out how to use teams um what process node what process node they left with and what process node that we're working on now here's the differences here's the tools that we use and here's the way so they understand the basics of the whole semiconductor industry but return ship programs allow you to come back so applaud that many companies have internship programs and they're very good for diversity and I hope that we spread the word on returnship programs so that people feel okay about leaving and coming back diversity networks inside your company having networks and groups for people so that they can talk amongst themselves and support each other and also allyships uh getting people together to understand how to be good allies what are techniques for allies and how they can help and also working with people in their transferable skills and you're going to see that and also as we grow this industry and how we can use transferable skills so you may be good at statistics with baseball but if you understand that and can make box plots and you can make diagrams and no artificial intelligence with baseball data okay let's change some of those into semiconductor wafer lot die and yield and then we'll show you what the semiconductor industry does with the same sort of data okay so they're transferable skills we just need to apply them to the semiconductor industry in fact that is actually a true story that is how we got Java programmers to work on yield design is by understanding what they were interested in giving them data making sure that we got the um the the graphics and analytics that we need and then we brought in the semiconductors from the and the yield data as well so transferable skills um also using for diversity equity and inclusion making sure that we hold ourselves accountable that we're looking at the metrics and doing everything that we can to try to improve the diversity in all diverse categories so when we talk about Dei there are many categories and I hope that we focus in on at least some of them so that we can bring them all up and use your metrics in order to guide get Baseline metrics and then goals also providing opportunities I think that is one of the things that everyone's looking for is not just only the support and the encouragement but also the opportunities so if there's opportunities to be on industry advisory councils if there's opportunities to learn new skills if there's opportunities to even present today and thank you I triple USA for allowing me to present having those opportunities helps and it helps us to expand our skills and to um you know to maybe even work to get into other verticals and if you saw from my career I went across the stack in semiconductor design and each one of those someone gave me an opportunity to work in a different area and when I was done I had done almost every single area in the in the digital design space and then the last one is professional development I I strongly encourage that for professional development please um try not to those people that are in the diverse areas certainly will benefit from classes but try also to give classes to everyone so that they understand what diversity looks like how to hire people that don't necessarily look or act like yourself how to write job requirements so that they're inclusive and providing professional development focusing on how we can all work together to create a more inclusive environment in semiconductors so I will just stop with just a few more on diversity and just show you a little bit about the state again these are things that are working by large companies which I am so thankful for um and I applaud everything that they do and I any ways that I can support them I certainly would like to do that the reason why that I'm doing that is because of some of the statistics now in terms of diversity one example is sustaining women technology prior to the pandemic the the data that we all know in the industry and have seen before is that women do not continue in the industry they drop off and there's all sorts of statistics and all sorts of numbers we need to make sure that we have the current numbers these they're pre-pandemic numbers some things like one-third leave within their first year many leave 10 to 15 years in two-thirds quit after 15. we need to figure out how to sustain diverse groups in technology we can bring them in but we have to keep them and we have to keep them and sustain them so um this is from the center for Creative leadership they give many good presentations in the past they have a lot of data as well they gave their uh their focus is to um you know challenge connect and invest women so they they giving active strategies on how to retain women in technology but this is a statistic that we need to keep watching and keep seeing if we can keep making sure that women or other diverse areas stay in the industry so when I look at what can we do for diversity is find ways to sustain them in the industry make this environment that they would stay and as always with any of these please look at the metrics um this is um the data from 2022 uh the the dark green bars are the women in technology and that's just um all women gray statistic but then also look at the other bar which many of many of the diversity reports have they're they're very open about it is the ones in the lower ones here are those that are in technical roles so when you're bringing the stem in there these are the green bars that are technical roles but in looking in all these we are like one percent increasing so we're struggling to increase but we're consistent and we're really trying but hopefully can we find ways that might help move that needle a little wider a little faster what are the things that we can do and from the other slides sustaining women in technology what are some strategies from that in the previous I talked about some of the things that some companies are doing with success but we need to continue to do exit surveys and uh you know surveys for and actions for what we can do and again let the metrics guide you um the one on the right is about the pandemic I led several women in engineering conferences during the pandemic and I can only say that it was very difficult for large groups of women around the world as the pandemic hit and having to focus on they couldn't focus on their careers they needed to focus on other things which were more important absolutely but they needed to leave the industry for various reasons and now as many are being asked to come back into the industry um it's it's difficult and the women are coming back a little bit slower than some of the other demographics so let the metrics guide and let's see how we can help now these are diversities in again it's women in technology but there is diversity uh metrics for many of the other diversity areas and I want hopefully to have focus on on many of those areas um this one on the left was from Deloitte and I have the links and references for that as well okay so many strategies the strategies are within once you're in the industry retaining them and creating healthy environments and so those are the diversity things that within the industry that we are working on and could certainly use additional help as people are working on these various initiatives okay I um just have a few minutes left so I hopefully through all this what I wanted to do is to kind of break it down so that you could see just get a little insight into how semiconductor chips are made take a little bit of the mystery so that at least we can start talking and I need us all to start talking about semiconductors how they're made Innovations and working with the other areas working with the stem groups working with the universities working with the new technologies the labs to Fabs all these but we can't start talking unless we get more comfortable about talking with it now hopefully this is a one tiny step forward in doing that so through these I always loved Friday when we did the vocabulary and you had to use everything in a sentence so I'm going to very quickly use some of the terms that we've learned and we'll use them in sentences so that we can try to understand what it is so RTL gds2 when someone says I spent my career in RTL gds2 or I'm I'm conducting the class on RTL to dds2 we know that that's someone who's working on design on the chips right pre-silicon is something that goes before the Silicon so it's before you toss it to the fat now pre-silicon often refers to pre-silicum verification versus post silicon verification but in general terms pre-silicon is something that happens before we toss it to the Fab so it's that digital design part Fabs versus foundries there is a difference Fabs are places that manufacture semiconductors foundries have a Fab and are offering the service of Fabs to other people they're in the business of Fabs I read an article that was trying to explain there's fads there's fabulous there's foundries and there's all different combinations of two on whether your company owns a fap doesn't own a Fab owns it and has a Fab so there's all sorts of things but just know that foundries are they they have Fabs as a business and Fabs are what manufactures it process knows you've learned all about process nodes there's advanced process nodes they're mature Foundry nodes and when we get a Fab up and running I want to ask two questions what process nodes are you targeting and has the Fab started yielding yet and usually when you start yielding to go on to the next one you'll usually a Fab will work with someone who has the design right because they need the designs so they work with someone that has the design in order to work with them in order to do bring up of the Fab so they'll run a design through look at the yield change the knobs and changes and the designer might change some things and then they'll keep working together until they can get that Fab yielding so there's a lot of Industry collaborations and we're not hearing a lot about the design centers or the industry collaborations and I'm hoping as the chip sacks continue that we will hear more about what those relationships are going to be we also learned packages versus die so you understand that there's that component there's a package and assembly and then there's the die that goes in amazing things going on in the packages they are on fire with the Innovations and the number of conferences that they're having they're talking about stack die how they're going to do interconnect so watch the space for packages but understand that packages is a different box than the foundries and different boxes that you design all interrelated it's all one wonderful ecosystem but there's different different areas sustaining women in technology diversity is going to depend on being able to to sustain diversity and one metric to look at is how we sustain women in technology if we get them all the way here and they leave within three years that's not what we want and if we get them here and they leave out of the industry middle you know if the careers that's not what we want so help find ways to keep them in to keep them in here I would be happy to discuss with anybody about some of the previous conversations and some resources certainly we could talk a lot about how some things that we could do in that area and last supporting diversity no networks diversity Equity inclusion using metrics and setting specific goals so I hope you've learned a lot about semiconductors but but wait um okay here I'll just very quickly um here there's more IEEE USA has some amazing events coming up and this is just the first of many IEEE USA has um this one is the first one hopefully I've raised a lot of questions and you can use a lot of these on July 12th there's going to be another conversation with Matt Francis and David Bondurant on the chips act and so hopefully you can ask them some of the questions that you heard here today you know what process note are they using or what process node did you start with did you do design from front to back and things like that so enjoy that conversation I know it's going to be really good I've read the BIOS on both and uh just it should be a great conversation I know I'll be attending and then there's also the monthly updates Elaine is giving updates and part of those are on the chip sack the chips act activity is moving so fast it's good to stay current because then we I was looking at something and it's like yeah I I don't know um you know if that's passed or not and she GFC the latest updates so stick around for those and then also there's a a conference in Arkansas talking about a very specific part related to the chips act on Innovation Workforce and research that looks amazing and in San Diego we will be talking about um The Fabulous or the design center the pre-silicon part um and how it relates to the whole ecosystem on ships there's some additional resources and hopefully can go back and screenshot that for some of them great reads if you're interested in the semiconductor field it puts these in things that you can really understand specifically the the Accenture report is explained so well in terms that are hopefully many can understand and and the semiconductor BCG report on strengthening the global semiconductor supply chain just an awesome read as well and so please check out these and I think these are really good for those that are new to the industry and give you good and accurate information thank you very much my email is um Kathy h i ee please email me if you have any questions I hope that you can see that this is a wonderful industry to be a part of and I certainly have been glad to be a part of this industry for so long so thank you everybody fantastic thank you so much Kathy uh folks so unfortunately we are out of time um we went over a lot of a lot of information we went over a lot of information um and again um if you have any questions uh be sure to reach out to Kathy and uh you know we we have as she also mentioned we have plenty of uh more materials and webinars up uh coming up um I would I do would like to I'm sorry I would like to mention uh aleene's uh DC legislative update is bi-weekly actually so our next one is on July 6th the following one will be on uh July 28 so we will be uh sending those links out to you um Kathy thank you so much for joining us today and for providing our audience Insight on the process of semiconductor uh chips and just just everything related to um I'm sure our audience got a lot out of it so thank you so much thank you Jonathan it's great to be here and thank you IEEE USA for having me and thank you to our audience members for tuning in um if you found this webinar topic interesting be sure to register for our other upcoming webinar the chips act a new era in the U.S semiconductor and let me just pull that up real quick uh being held on July 12th at 2 pm sponsored by triple USA in the center of excellence for wireless and information technology at Stony Brook and presented by I triple members David Bondurant Dr Matt Francis um it'll be a very uh very interesting um as the chips Act is something that I triple USA has been I've been working in a big proponent for for the last several years we will be highlighting the details of Chip's Act passed last year including how it returns Leading Edge of manufacturing to the U.S reinforces our traditional strengths in chip design and more so we've included the links below come on second uh please don't forget to like share and subscribe to our channels on social media and check back daily for future livestream updates thank you so much everyone [Music]

Channel: IEEEUSA

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Id: lQKCES5gXSo

Length: 65min 3sec (3903 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023