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 ft of Cutting Edge tilk development fabrication and testing
facilities and thanks to micron's 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 my goodness this is a really big
parking lot Boise main site as it's known already hosts a small army of
Hightech workers nearly 9,000 and many more are coming as part
of a $15 billion investment plan that will see up to
600,000 Square ft of sustainable clean room manufacturing space brought online
starting in 2025 but its raise on Detra
today is completely different I'm about
to enter Fab 4 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 techniques that Micron can then deploy
at their manufacturing centers in Taiwan Singapore Japan and Virginia they
couldn't even tell me the name 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 highdensity 1 beta node Dam and 232 layer nen that
Micron is currently shipping to customers what they were able to tell me
though is that as part of the development of their upcoming one gamma
and one Delta nodes they're currently installing one of as sml's
state-of-the-art extreme ultraviolet or euv lithog graphy 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 180,000 tons
and took 3 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
JC creates the specification and assuming you've got deep enough pockets
for asml shiniest new toy you just
follow the recipe right well I asked some Micron folks if that's how it
worked
and that's fair enough I mean even ignoring the challenge is 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 meet
the UF 3000 wafer probing machine this
thing is super cool our fop 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 dyes which can then be tested to ensure
that they're functioning as expected spoil sper 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 it's 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 hairlike 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 prober for hours or days at a time and two
we're actually able to probe the dye
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 oh I got to zoom in I can't even see it uh so if we if we
change the focus here holy crap so if we
go back out and then you zoom in 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 io of the D but what's happening inside the D
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
up to fail was that enough they started moving movie Magic were moving over to
one that they already landed for me cuz 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
schwamp schwamp the space between the Dy
is actually cut away it's extremely small okay my bud here is going to 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 a protective layer that goes over top of
it man it's amazing how big that probe
looks relative to the D like what oh oh
you missed yeah that's you have to get
the angle just right so to kind of just bend on the top of it that's fine I
think the people get it it's really hard now the key KN 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 dieses 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 on
into 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 in 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 dyes 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
dieses perfect on the X and Y AIS it cuts to a perfect depth such that the
dieses 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 dyes 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 dyes thermally Bond them with Incredible
Precision attach these Bond wires so that you can actually solder the bloody
thing to aboard then embed the whole thing in an epoxy or 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 be dye material but this familiar plain black rectangle is what's actually
going to make its way to the next stage the 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 cross talk 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 dies 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 packaged di 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 or desolder them or whatever the case may be the load board
then goes onto our testing table here and man I'm going to 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 our 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 a 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
bad boy apparently do 33 GHz now
obviously micron's not going to 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 C honestly compared to the equipment it
took to make that one decent wafer with a couple usable dieses 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 black last 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 going
to be careful 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 pic
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 100 W first this time encapsulate those and send them over
here this is a bining 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 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 dyes
and puts them through hell intensive operations hot cold the works then the
dyes 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 spin
could be sold as a slower part or maybe this bin has fuses that you could blow
so you got a 16 GB die and you know half
of it's fine but you just disable the other half and now it's an 8 gigabit die
that stuff happens all the time but when it does that's not a prime dye anymore
the dyes that go into micron's consumer crucial branded dims those are all going
to be prime D dies and on that subject I
think we've actually got some here so it might be time for to go build my modules
now that we have trays upon trays of these packaged dieses 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
going to 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 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 LTT Store.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 Sho it's like already done wait is
it already coming out the other side oh my God it's 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 to 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 going to 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 going to we're just going to take our soon to 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 going to be able to
hold okay this is uh this is some
Precision work and I can't even rest my hand on the rest of the panel
so 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 going to 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 not good 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 xacto knife time for round two I asked about the
solder water 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
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 I okay so right I uh I click pass
okay so I have overridden the machine 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
machines 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 dieses
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 uh 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 prep ahead of time dozens or wow 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
they have to do is pick in place the eight packaged dyes 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 ah so it's got to get the right board gripper you might be doing sood
dims or dims or ddr4 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 Burnin 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 kind that their customers might put their memory in and
then just absolutely pummeling these
things for 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
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 Brands 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 companies 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
that 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 3M X 3M anoa chamber on me cuz 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 on to 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 em Mii while monitoring for abnormal behavior or instability either
of which would of course be unacceptable that 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 chalk 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 it's
ridiculous I still have no idea what we built but they did tell me they had
these D flown in specially so maybe
there's something pretty cool
A2 hey we got something CPU or memory
changed 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 G wait what the hell
am I reading this right these are 24 gab
modules no one's volunteering what the hell is a 24 gig module explain yourself
uh I can't that's why nobody volunteered okay
so how did what what now this is obvious
1337 for the part number 8
terabytes DDR 9 9,000 that's a missed
opportunity it should have been over 9,000 obviously okay but for but for
real you got to you got to tell you got to give me something to work with here
so
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 gab memory modules and am
I am I allowed to run them like in my system is there any reason I couldn't
yeah just can't don't sell them and these are
XMP bleep that 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