How is processor made

In this phase, engineers test all chips individually and rule out chips that do not function properly or those that do not meet manufacturer quality standards. If they pass the test, the chips are mounted on a substrate and the heat sink IHS is placed on top of them , creating what we all know as a processor.

This process is called assembly. This outer packaging protects the chip from almost all damage, including shock, splash or heat. This substrate has in its lower area all the necessary contacts for the processor to work in conjunction with the motherboard where we install it, of course. Once the assembly process is finished, the processor goes to the last step before it reaches us, the stored one. In this last step, the processors are put in their boxes, along with the heatsinks, instruction manual and more, and they are all packaged together.

This is the product that we will buy in the end. From here, Intel sends its processors to OEM manufacturers, distributors and all the sales network that it has around the world, who will either sell the PCs with an already installed processor, or they will serve the material to the stores that is where we we can buy a processor.

You have already seen it. From the time the processor is designed until it reaches our homes, it goes through a complex process that takes place around almost everyone, and involving hundreds of people. How to make an Intel processor. As the growth continues, the seed is slowly extracted or "pulled" from the melt. As the the ingot is pulled it is slowly rotated. This is done to help normalize any temperature variations in the melt.

The temperature of the melt and the speed of extraction govern the diameter of the ingot, and the concentration of an electrically active element in the melt governs the electrical properties of the silicon wafers to be made from the ingot. This is a complex, proprietary process requiring many control features on the crystal-growing equipment. The crystals naturally tend to a circular shape due to the crystal structure itself, and the surface tension on the liquid.

This process can take several hours. This results in a large ingot that looks like this: To be useful the ingot must be very pure. The ends and edges are the areas of highest impurities this is due to annealing so the ends are cut off and the edges are ground down so the ingot is the proper diameter. Next the wafers are cut from the ingot. They are usually cut mm thick with a fast wire saw.

Process refers to the size and spacing of the individual circuits and transistors on the chip. In late and into , chip manufacturing processes began moving from the 0. The larger mm wafers alone enable more than double the number of chips to be made, compared to the mm used previously.

The smaller 0. This means the trend for incorporating more and more cache within the die will continue, and transistor counts will rise to 1 billion per chip or more by As an example of how this can affect a particular chip, let's look at the original Pentium 4. The standard wafer size used in the industry for many years was mm in diameter, or just under 8". This results in a wafer of about 31, square millimeters in area. The first version of the Pentium 4 with the Willamette core used a 0.

Therefore, up to of these chips could fit on a mm 8" wafer. The Pentium 4 processors with the Northwood core that followed it use a smaller 0. Northwood has double the on-die L2 cache KB as compared to Willamette, which is why the transistor count is significantly higher. Even with the higher transistor count, the smaller 0. Starting in early , Intel began producing Northwood on the larger mm wafers, which have a surface area of 70, square millimeters. These wafers have 2. In the case of the Pentium 4 Northwood, up to chip dies fit on a mm wafer.

By combining the smaller die with the larger wafer, Pentium 4 production has increased by more than 3. This is one reason newer chips are often more plentiful and less expensive than older ones. In , the industry began moving to the nanometer 0.

Most new chips in were based on the 0. In , we'll likely see a move toward a nanometer process, and we'll see a nanometer process in These advancements in process will allow 1 billion transistors per chip in !

All these will still be made on mm wafers because the next wafer transition isn't expected until , when a transition to mm wafers is being considered. Table 3. Note that not all the chips on each wafer will be good, especially as a new production line starts. As the manufacturing process for a given chip or production line is perfected, more and more of the chips will be good.

The ratio of good to bad chips on a wafer is called the yield. Most chip manufacturers guard their yield figures and are very secretive about them because knowledge of yield problems can give their competitors an edge. A low yield causes problems both in the cost per chip and in delivery delays to their customers. If a company has specific knowledge of competitors' improving yields, it can set prices or schedule production to get higher market share at a critical point. After a wafer is complete, a special fixture tests each of the chips on the wafer and marks the bad ones to be separated out later.

The chips are then cut from the wafer using either a high-powered laser or diamond saw. After being cut from the wafers, the individual dies are then retested, packaged, and retested again. The packaging process is also referred to as bonding because the die is placed into a chip housing in which a special machine bonds fine gold wires between the die and the pins on the chip.

The package is the container for the chip die, and it essentially seals it from the environment. After the chips are bonded and packaged, final testing is done to determine both proper function and rated speed. Different chips in the same batch often run at different speeds.

Special test fixtures run each chip at different pressures, temperatures, and speeds, looking for the point at which the chip stops working. At this point, the maximum successful speed is noted and the final chips are sorted into bins with those that tested at a similar speed.

For example, the Pentium 4 2. They were sorted at the end of the manufacturing cycle by speed. One interesting thing about this is that as a manufacturer gains more experience and perfects a particular chip assembly line, the yield of the higher-speed versions goes way up.

The paradox is that Intel often sells a lot more of the lower-priced, lower-speed chips, so it just dips into the bin of faster ones, labels them as slower chips, and sells them that way. People began discovering that many of the lower-rated chips actually ran at speeds much higher than they were rated, and the business of overclocking was born.

As people learned more about how processors are manufactured and graded, an interesting problem arose: Unscrupulous vendors began re-marking slower chips and reselling them as if they were faster. Often the price between the same chip at different speed grades can be substantial—in the hundreds of dollars—so by changing a few numbers on the chip, the potential profits can be huge. Because most of the Intel and AMD processors are produced with a generous safety margin—that is, they typically run well past their rated speeds—the re-marked chips would seem to work fine in most cases.

Of course, in many cases they wouldn't work fine, and the system would end up crashing or locking up periodically. At first, the re-marked chips were just a case of rubbing off the original numbers and restamping with new official-looking numbers.

These were easy to detect, though. Re-markers then resorted to manufacturing completely new processor housings, especially for the plastic-encased Slot 1 and Slot A processors from Intel and AMD that were popular in the late '90s and still quite common just a few years ago. Although it might seem to be a huge bother to make a custom plastic case and swap it with the existing case, because the profits can be huge, criminals find it very lucrative.

This type of re-marking is a form of organized crime and isn't just some kid in his basement with sandpaper and a rubber stamp. Intel and AMD have seen fit to put a stop to some of the re-marking by building overclock protection in the form of a multiplier lock into most of their chips dating back nearly 10 years.

This is usually done in the bonding or cartridge manufacturing process, where the chips are intentionally altered so they won't run at any speeds higher than they are rated. Usually this involves changing the bus frequency BF pins or traces on the chip, which control the internal multipliers the chip uses. At one point, many feared that fixing the clock multiplier would put an end to hobbyist overclocking, but that proved not to be the case.

Enterprising individuals found ways to run their motherboards at bus speeds higher than normal, so even though the CPU generally won't allow a higher multiplier, you can still run it at a speed higher than it was designed for by ramping up the speed of the processor bus.

The real problem with the overclock protection as implemented by Intel and AMD is that the professional counterfeiter has often been able to figure out a way around it by modifying the chip physically. Today's socketed processors are much more immune to these re-marking attempts, but it is still possible, particularly because the evidence can be hidden under a heatsink. To protect yourself from purchasing a fraudulent chip, verify the specification numbers and serial numbers with Intel and AMD before you purchase.

Also beware where you buy your hardware. Purchasing over online auction sites can be extremely dangerous because defrauding the purchaser is so easy. The boxed versions are shrink-wrapped and contain a high-quality heatsink, documentation, and a 3-year warranty with the manufacturer. Fraudulent computer components are not limited to processors.

I have seen fake memory, fake mice, fake video cards, fake cache memory, counterfeit operating systems and applications, and even fake motherboards. The hardware that is faked usually works but is of inferior quality to the type it is purporting to be. For example, one of the most highly counterfeited pieces of hardware at one time was the Microsoft mouse. Variations on the pin grid array PGA chip packaging have been the most commonly used chip packages over the years.

They were used starting with the processor in the s and are still used today, although not in all CPU designs. PGA takes its name from the fact that the chip has a grid-like array of pins on the bottom of the package. A ZIF socket has a lever to allow for easy installation and removal of the chip. Most Pentium processors use a variation on the regular PGA called staggered pin grid array SPGA , in which the pins are staggered on the underside of the chip rather than in standard rows and columns.

This was done to move the pins closer together and decrease the overall size of the chip when a large number of pins is required. Note that the right half of the Pentium Pro shown here has additional pins staggered among the other rows and columns.

Older PGA variations had the processor die mounted in a cavity underneath the substrate, with the top surface facing up if you turned the chip upside down. The die was then wire-bonded to the chip package with hundreds of tiny gold wires connecting the connections at the edge of the chip with the internal connections in the package. After the wire bonding, the cavity was sealed with a metal cover.

This was an expensive and time-consuming method of producing chips, so cheaper and more efficient packaging methods were designed.