I've spent most of my career trying to get into a chip Fab Samsung's a hard no
Global foundaries was open to it in person then ghosted me when I followed
up and Intel has said no to me every
single time I've asked except one honestly I'm pretty overwhelmed today
because I'm going to be taking three major items off my bucket list I'm
visiting Israel for the first time I'm going to be going deep into the heart of
Intel state-of-the-art Fab 28 and I get
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below my tour guide today couldn't be more experienced Danny is the co-general
manager of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing and started at Intel
working in Fab 8 in Jerusalem back when their state-of-the-art was the Pentium 1
microprocessor fabrication experts can safely skip ahead a couple of minutes
but for everyone else let's run through the basics every CPU die every one of
these starts with a sliced up silicon Ingot like the one right here these are
astonishingly pure and are exactly 300
mm in diameter if they went any smaller they'd increase waist around the edges I
mean look at this obviously this is not going to be a working chip if it's cut
off by the edge of the circle fun fact by the way the reason that they run the
non-working Edge dieses through all of the same fabrication processes is that
it actually improves the uniformity of the full chips next to them consistency
is key in CPU manufacturing because even though we talk about these chips in
terms like 14 or 10 nanometer the
components that make up these transistors are much smaller like on the
order of less than a nanometer and a tiny eror or contaminant in any of the
hundreds of manufacturing steps means that that die he no work I mean it's a
modern miracle that any of this is possible and is basically unheard of to
get an entire 300 mm wafer through the Fab without a single defective die on it
before it can be sold however it needs to be transformed from melted sand like
this into the brains of your PC silicon you see is neither an insulator nor is
it a true conductor so to create all the little transistors or switches that
control current flow through the logic gates and other micro structures on the
chip the wafer needs to undergo many processes implantation fires dopent ions
into the surface of the Silicon to alter its electrical characteristics so
depending on what kinds of ions are implanted say phosphorus or Boron you
might be laying the groundwork for an N type or a ptype transistor this
determines if the voltage is negative or positive to open the gate diffusion
furnaces create new combined materials by exposing the wafer to various gases
at up to hundreds of De C lithography is one of the easiest steps to understand
conceptually but also one of the most important within a single processor die
there are billions of transistors and literally kilometers of tiny wires but
they're obviously far too small to build them and solder them together by hand so
the wafer gets coated with a material called photo resist then exposed to UV
light through a mask anywhere the light passes through the mask the photo resist
will be removed allowing the exposed portions to be processed then it's quite
literally rinse and repeat Nikon who
does a lot more than make cameras by the way has a great diagram on their site
demonstrating this so one such potential processing step is etching where the
goal is to selectively remove material from the top of the wafer creating
trenches in it these can be overfilled with copper to create interconnects then
the excess gets removed by polishing it off using brushes and slurry in a
process called chemical mechanical planarization there are different kinds
of etching but we can talk about that more once we get
inside this is it point of no return here we go there there's no card or
anything just yeah it's very good high
security time to learn the procedure this is great this very inclusive they
have child-sized gloves for people like me this is crazy so these are not the
gloves we wear in the clean room these are the gloves to put put on the stuff
that we're going to wear in the clean room that will be contaminated that then
we will get rid of after wow man I'm
looking sharp now time for stage two
basically we grab a couple of little foot cover doodads here and this room is
pressurized and the idea is that these these aren't like filtered like the
clean room or anything like that but by having a little bit of pressure in this
room we keep this super stanky air from outside out so when you walk into here
you feel this gust of air coming out and then what you're supposed to do is
you're supposed to have dirty stuff on this side and then clean stuff on this
side so I got to put my little booties on did I do it right help okay so
there's more positive pressure in here blowing that way right so the idea then
I guess is the air gets cleaner and cleaner as we go okay what do I
do yeahp top to bottom okay why do we go
top to bottom so that the dust won't fall off our top onto our bottom better
that um it will suit into the bunny suits oh got it cuz that's how the
overlap I have a feeling our audio is not going to be um our finest ever for
this video ladies and gentlemen you'll have to bear with us cuz my microphone
is already under three layers of fabric
now we're out of the Gown room into the
Fab the Fab and it's already crazy okay you see these like robots on tracks up
here apparently these are taking the fots and I checked that is actually what
it's called f which is 25 wafers so
that's 25 slices of the original silicon
Ingot that fuk we just saw that little robot on the track had hundreds of CPU
dies in it but we don't know how many of them are good because they're actually on their way to sorting where not only
will they determine if they work but they'll determine how well so is it a
COR i7 or a COR I9 every guy wants to
live it sounds like a nerdy James Bond film I love
it oh my God this place is a lot biger
than it initially looked how many square feet is this four football
fields diffusion over there and deposition was over there
right and what on the other etching and
and planing so we're going to look at all of that but there's no particular
order for these steps because once a fop comes in here you guys can see they're
whipping around all over the place there are hundreds of stages each older Lake
CPU dive might go from lithography to
planing to deposition back and forth
hundreds of
times every silicon wafer comes to
diffusion land and basically what these machines do they're more like a a
furnace and they will take that top layer of silic on the wafer and they
will diffuse it with some kind of other material uh I asked for some examp
examples but other than silicon oxide they wouldn't really tell me anything
and in fact they wouldn't even tell me what the first material layer would be
for the spirit processors that they're making here now there you go we can
actually see the robot ARM inside that would take the Silicon Wafers out of the
food and position them as needed for the machine this is the loading area down
here that we can see through the window and then up top is the actual furnace
where it reaches hundreds of degrees and then it has uh gases in there that help
them to achieve whatever kind of chemical changes that they're going for
on top of the wafer one thing Intel's been very particular about is don't
touch anything because it's more than just you know not pressing the wrong
button but actually even just bumping these machines when you're trying to
build something that has structures in it that are on the size order of
nanometers that means that the building blocks of that thing are sub nanometer
in some cases so you you actually you cannot you cannot bump one of these
machines while it's running and in fact they only build their Fabs on
particularly stable parts of the world where they don't have to worry about
excess seismic activity this is cool as we were walking
through diffusion we actually got a great opportunity to show you guys the
multi-level structure of the Fab so what we're walking on is only one of four
total layers above us are filters and
the air comes from there down to here then below us is where they're going to
have pumps uh chemistry delivery you can
see these punch outs in the floor here you can actually see there's like a foam
like vent of some sort going up into the machine that's next to us and then the
air flows from top to bottom so it goes down to that layer then it goes down to
one more layer where they have uh water utilities like electricity as well as
exhaust so that air goes back up the side of the building and recirculates in
total Intel expects anywhere from Z to one particle per uh what was the unit of
volume 1 M cubed and for context an
operating room could have tens of thousands of particles per meter cubed
so you you could conceivably perform surgery in here assuming you were
qualified I asked about this sign and apparently it's just to make sure that
if people are blowing through this Corridor they don't accidentally smoke
someone coming out of the red this is one of the most secret Areas even here
inside the Fab which is already a secret area because it contains some of the
most expensive materials that they need for lithography it's also some of the
most top secret now under normal circumstances every one of these
stations would be occupied by someone in fact the entire Factory runs on four
shifts a day 247 364 days a year only
shutting down for Yam kaper so I didn't
ask because I'm afraid to know the answer but I think it's probably costing
Intel a fair amount to have Us in here poking around while they didn't sponsor
the video or anything definitely shout out to Intel for how much it's costing
them for us to make this video on that note here's something cool
these tools are maybe not as sophisticated as some of the other tools
here in the Fab got your flathead screwdriver but the process is what's
fascinating because taking a machine like this offline for more than a few
minutes at a time very very costly so
they handle it kind of like a formula one pit crew they've got all their tools
everything's arranged freaking ready to rock they go okay time we're shutting it
off we're performing maintenance go go go go go go go fire it back up that's it
don't worry I will not hit any buttons this is the emo button okay the machine
will get very sad if you press it this machine right here is doing dry etching
right now so the fops come down off of
the track up there and then while they're waiting you can see they're
actually sitting out they sit away from the machine and while they're being
processed they come up right next to it here and then you can see there's the
robot ARM inside grabbing Wafers
whipping them around it just throws it on here for a span of I don't know five
or 10 seconds boom it's dry etched it
goes back in the fop and then that whole fop is going to head off to whatever the
next step is for this particular processor we don't know exactly what
it's making but everything here is Intel 7 so modern CPUs pretty much or maybe
future CPUs for all I know not every drying machine is identical as you guys
can imagine for all the different specialized processes that a wafer goes
through there might be different Machinery so this is another example of
a dry etching machine where the wafer actually sits in this chamber in here
and does whatever the heck it's doing
now we're heading back to the lithography area again which is why the lighting in the Fab has changed back to
yellow and the reason for that is they use UV light to expose the w wers so if
they had white light it could easily contain parts of the spectrum that could
accidentally expose the wafer so they have to use these carefully controlled
light sources that will not cause any damage to the Wafers as they're ripping
around in the fuks or going in and out of the machines fun fact each of these
machines costs on the order of 30 to4
million and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out or I should say
a a chip architect to figure out that
you put this many of them tap this tight into an area the size of four football
pitches um that's going to cost a pretty penny and it's because of those costs
that they actually have this entire sort
of R of cabinets I guess you could call it in between the East and West sides of
the fat this entire thing is full of poops that are just waiting to be
processed because the second one of those machines is available you want to
be loading it up with silicon so you can make more processors now we're at of
phography again then we're in the east side of the Fab which is also freaking
enormous and the first machines that we're encountering are deposition
machines so what these do is they'll
take the wafer and they'll apply some
extraordinarily thin layer of something say for example metal okay then it comes
back into the boof back up to the rails and off to the next step did I ever say
we're going to go see the planers now depending on the stage of wait for
processing cuz remember if you go back and forth hundreds of times for a single
die you don't necessarily want the straight edges of a dry edch you might
want this kind of curved shape of a wet
Edge now the actual exact shape is apparently extremely important and
extremely difficult to control because unlike a dry Edge there's actually you
can actually hear the sounds of the pump you hear that right now so there's
actually chemicals pumping inside another key consideration if you've got
such expensive Machinery is training so one of the things that Intel wanted to
show us is how they're using augmented reality practically right here in the
Fab for a variety of purposes so one is due to covid-19 obviously some Personnel
were not able to be here in person for an extended period of time so remote
assist allows someone who is here in person to actually have someone else
scribbling on a schematic or explaining it to them while it hovers in front of
them pretty freaking cool it's also used as a training resource for maintenance
for the machine Mach so that you can kind of learn by doing and they're
actually going to do a practical demo for us hey here's our here's our test
Penny Pig here and he gets to look at my mug that's
unfortunate oh that's awesome so it shows you all the tools you need so
there's a little instructional video for how to do it very cool hey look at me
I'm a Fab equipment maintenance technician unfortunately the Windows on
these machines are quite dark but we did manage to catch one that is being
processed right now so we've got some footage to show you guys essentially
after the deposition step you're going to end up with some inherent unevenness
that needs to be polished off now in the past they might have actually submerged
the Wafers for polishing but now it's actually done by a brush that has a
slurry on it that Intel said is very proprietary they wouldn't even give me
any hints as to what is in this this
polishing liquid but they did tell me that the pressure as well as the motion
of it has to be so precise that they could take off as little as a few atoms
or molecules at a time so you can see the wafer moving back and forth on the
like spinning bottom crazy one thing that's missing is I don't see where that
trade that loads all the wers in is where the poop is it ha get it cuz it's
a poop by the way something I didn't mention before is that each of the
different types of machines actually has a number but it also has these animals
because Intel found that especially in a multi-layer design like Fab 28 in order
to make sure that the maintenance crew down below is actually you know shutting
down the correct machine for maintenance up above it's much easier to communicate
and much easier to remember oh we're working on a giraffe machine or a
ladybug machine apparently most of the
staff that we saw in there though were actually maintenance staff for the
machines and the actual control center of rein of the operation is elsewhere so
we're gonna head over there now this is the remote operational Center which is
you could think of kind of like the brains of the Fab that we just saw so if
something goes wrong it's going to pop up as an error on someone's screen so
it's the job of everyone in this room to optimize the overall throughput of the
Fab so instead of having technicians there on the Fab floor moving things
around and looking at screens and turning dials everything is done right
here to ensure that they're pumping as many chips out as possible because once
you invest $0 $40 million in a machine
times however many were in there you
want them going as hard as you possibly can as often as you possibly
can every shift they have to do two stretching sessions in order to you know
minimize the risk of RSI because they're basically sitting at their computers all
day every day
right but like the friend who only invited you to dinner because he wanted
to show off his new car Intel had a bit of an agenda for inviting us here and
that is to show off the enormous investment that they're making into Fab
38 so everything that we just saw is about to be doubled this roundabout see
you later in about 2 weeks that entire construction site out there is going to
be state-of-the-art new generation fabrication technology that will
actually be integrated so tightly with the existing Fab that you could actually
take a wafer from one utilize equipment in the other and then send it back if
you really needed to although that's going to be quite a distance for the fops to travel to give you some idea of
how enormous this construction project is Intel actually built their own
concrete production in the corner of the lot over there which you can see at the
very back unreal one of the big reasons
Intel is building out Fab capacity so aggressively right now is a New Concept
called IDM 2.0 where basically instead of only building their own products
they're going to be Fab products for third party companies which I personally
given that we're sitting in the middle of the largest ever Global silicon shortage am pretty excited about now
unfortunately there are a couple of steps in the die creation process that
we weren't able to see today the addition of the bumps that connect the
die to the package through electroplating that doesn't happen here
and quality control QC starts with an endof thee line e test which checks the
functionality of fake debugging structures and transistors that are
specifically meant to be there to ensure that everything went correctly
manufacturing then it proceeds to binning which is the process of sorting
the good dieses according to their capabilities obviously the best of the
best will become core I9 the next best will be core i7 and so on and so forth
other than that 12th gen core or Alder lake is a pretty unique product for
Intel with much of the design and Manufacturing done here in Israel once
the wafer's done Intel sends it to one of their other facilities for slicing
and packaging and a second validation step called class where they basically
burn in every single chip to ensure that no degradation took place and that the
packaging was done properly this along with design phase testing that simulates
the effects of CPU aging is where Intel's reputation for manufacturing
quality comes from I mean think about it when you're troubleshooting a system
that won't boot the CPU is the last thing you're going to check because
unless you dropped it it probably works packaging by the way is going to be
getting a lot more complicated over the next few years as multi- processors like
the upcoming Sapphire rapid start rolling out and it's expected that the
relatively basic packaging facilities of yester year are going to be getting a
lot more fabike I mean a packaging error on a $10,000 server CPU is a pretty
expensive mistake given that the whole thing needs to be thrown away at that
stage if something goes wrong maybe that should be the next tour I request am I
right actually I'm not going to push my luck at the moment this was a once in
a-lifetime opportunity and I'm extremely grateful to Danny and his team shout out
to Karen by the way for hosting me to you guys for coming and sharing it with
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guys enjoyed this video maybe check out one of our previous tours it's been a
little while but they're excellent videos