How CPUs Are Made As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,163 words · ~5 min read
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putting something together yourself can be a really satisfying experience
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whether it's a recipe a tool shed or of course your own PC but ordering parts
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from your favorite website and slotting them together is really as far as most
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people go I mean you can't exactly whip up a a CPU from scratch can you well you
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can't but fortunately companies like Intel Global foundaries and tsmc do it
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every day but how believe it or not the
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main ingredient in that fancy cor i7
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sitting in your rig or that Snapdragon sitting in your smartphone is sand I
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mean it isn't exactly the same stuff that you find on the beach it's
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specially mined in order to be more pure
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than what you would make a sand castle out of and this sand is heated to
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thousands of degrees and chemically purified to produce a virtually Flawless
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cylinder of silicon hence the name Silicon Valley for California is
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high-tech region now the reason that Purity is so important is that as
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processor technology has continued to advance the tiny transistors on CPUs
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have gotten smaller and smaller so that more of them can fit on One processor
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die making it more powerful and because
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chipmakers are now packing as many of these transistors as possible onto CPUs
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the margins for error are extremely slim making precise manufacturing and Ultra
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Clean environments abs absolute musts so
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after the Silicon is purified it's cut into what are called Wafers which
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resemble mirrors more than the cracker kind of wafer that wafer is then
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polished a photosensitive chemical is applied kind of like what's used in film
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then ultraviolet light is sha through a stencil that's shaped exactly like the
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transistor layout that the engineers created for the CPU because Wafers
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themselves are usually quite large the process of shining light through the
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stencil can be repeated many times fitting hundreds of CPU dyes onto a
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single wafer after the UV light step is
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complete the wafer is washed in a solvent that dissolves the exposed areas
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leaving a pattern that another machine etches into the wafer itself these
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etches are then bombarded by ions that charged atoms that embed themselves into
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the Silicon changing the way that they conduct electricity to create
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transistors that only allow current to flow in One Direction which means they
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can function as Tiny switches or Gates
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that make your CPU able to understand instructions which by the way you can
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learn more about here in fact the whole reason we use silicon as the base for
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processors is because of its ability to accept these ions that form the
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foundation for modern transistors so after these transistors
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are created the next step is to connect them together to make a functional
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processor die this is done with rigid copper interconnects essentially tiny
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wires that are applied on top of the transistors with a similar ultraviolet
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and etching process to what I explained earlier exactly how they're connected
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depends on what CPU architecture the engineers are using whether it be
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something like Sky Lake code name Skylake for Intel or code name zen for
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AMD this is done in many many layers to
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prevent any of these wires from accidentally touching and causing a
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ShortCircuit or any other kind of defect the dyes are then tested and the
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good ones are placed into a CPU package
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that is what allows it to plug into the socket on your motherboard you add a
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heat spreader on top of that and voila you've got the Beating Heart of your new
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PC phone or anything else that requires a CPU but is silicon always going to be
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the core ingredient in the buffet of CPUs of life
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well because of the chemical properties of silicon actually the answer is
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probably no we're very close to the physical limit of how small transistors
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can be made on Silicon meaning that we may see CPUs made from something
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completely different by the end of this decade but silicon will remain very
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