[HN Gopher] How Microchips Work
___________________________________________________________________
How Microchips Work
Author : pbamotra
Score : 226 points
Date : 2024-03-17 05:17 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exclusivearchitecture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (exclusivearchitecture.com)
| 0wis wrote:
| I am not an expert but it seems like a great source to understand
| chips without getting top deep. It reminds me the classic << Nand
| 2 Tetris >> course [1] with less involvement indeed. Thanks for
| the developer and thanks for sharing. Curious to know industry
| expert comments !
|
| [1]:https://www.nand2tetris.org/
| nairboon wrote:
| There is also the NandGame: https://nandgame.com/
| lencastre wrote:
| Interesting, Turing Complete is also from NAND to microcomputer.
|
| [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/
| gdevic wrote:
| I loved the article! Spot on and just the right depth for the
| article size (I am a CPU architect).
| ww520 wrote:
| Silicon is the perfect material for semiconductor. It has a low
| band gap energy between the valence band and conduction band. A
| small amount of energy, electricity applied to it, can knock its
| outermost valence electrons off and it becomes conductive.
| Withholding the energy, its valence electrons fall back in place
| and it becomes non-conductive. As if by luck, silicon is
| plentiful and cheap.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is missing one of the most important reasons though:
| Silicon Oxide.
|
| Silicon Oxide is almost perfectly lattice matched to silicon,
| but completely insulating. Which means it's incredibly easy to
| grow features onto polished silicon wafers because the
| oxidation product of the material is _exactly_ what you need in
| order to build up insulating features - i.e. MOSFET junctions,
| capacitors and conductive paths.
| kken wrote:
| Silicon oxide grown on Si is actually amorphous, so it is not
| lattice matched.
|
| But you are complety right, the oxidation properties of Si
| are really fortunate and ICs would have taken decades longer
| if it were not for that. SiO2 is really the unsung hero of
| the silicon age.
|
| - SiO2 has a high bandgap and a very good insulator.
|
| - It is quite inert to many chemical and gasses. (e.g.
| germanium oxide is soluble in water, which is a headache)
|
| - It can easily be grown on stoiciometric form by oxidizing
| silicon and will form an abrupt interface to Si.
|
| - The formation proceeds by diffusion of oxygen to the Si
| interface. This is in contrast to other metal oxides, where
| the metal will diffuse to the surface and create a
| nonstoiciometric mixture.
|
| There is no other semiconductor that forms as good an oxide.
| Very few metals form insulating oxides on their surface, one
| notable exception is Aluminum.
|
| Edit: The famous paper that describes the SiO2 formation
| kinetics was actually co-authored by Andy Grove, from intel
| CEO fame.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal%E2%80%93Grove_model
| stavros wrote:
| Huh, it's as if the universe was built to make computers
| out of.
| kken wrote:
| It's as if someone created one element that is perfectly
| suited to build microelectronics. Sure, there are other
| materials that improve on one property or the other, but
| there is not a single other element which balances
| properties as well as silicon.
|
| Not even mentioned yet:
|
| - Excellent mechanical properties of the single crystal
| (think MEMS, or wafers that don't break all the time)
|
| - Piezoresistive properties can be used to measure strain
| (also quite unique due to silicon band structure)
|
| - Optical properties perfectly suited to detect visible
| light (think detectors, image sensors). Good combination
| of band gap and carrier lifetime to build solar cells.
| amelius wrote:
| A fully optical computer would be better still.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing
| eternauta3k wrote:
| It took ages from the theoretical invention of the MOS
| transistor to us being able to grow practically good
| enough oxides (which aren't riddled with interface
| traps)...
| stavros wrote:
| Imagine how long it would have taken if silicon wasn't
| this ideal.
| kken wrote:
| More like a decade, unless you refer to the Lilienfeld
| devices.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Yes, I was thinking of Lilienfeld. What starting point
| are you taking?
| kken wrote:
| Bell labs tried to build a FET before the bipolar
| transistor. It's not so clear which theory the Lilienfeld
| devices are based on.
| namaria wrote:
| The universe is such that the computers that do exist
| seem perfectly matched to its properties. How could it
| not be so? Other possible universes might have completely
| different computers and the kind we have here would be
| unimaginable there.
| stavros wrote:
| If silicon didn't exist, our computers wouldn't seem
| perfectly matched. It would be a struggle to make them
| and keep them working.
| namaria wrote:
| For silicon not to exist, the universe would have to be
| quite different. Maybe making life possible and in some
| planet a life form might eventually find out how to build
| computers with whatever chemistry they'd end up with. And
| the chemistry of such a universe would seem uncannily
| suited for such computers.
|
| Point being, you can't delete an element from the
| universe and expect everything else to be the same.
| Silicon exists because of the physics in this universe.
| So do silicon based computers.
| layer8 wrote:
| There is the flaw that they don't build themselves,
| though.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| One time I was driving around, and I thought to myself
| "Boy, it sure is lucky we had all the products for
| asphalt laying around, or it would have been difficult to
| build all these roads."
|
| Then I realized that if the products for building roads
| weren't around, then we wouldn't have had those roads in
| the first place, and I wouldn't have been reflecting on
| how lucky we were to have all this stuff.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Clay and glass are also partially made of silicon, right?
|
| I've always found of fascinating that silicon was right there
| at the beginning of material science, and has stuck around
| since. Same for copper.
|
| I don't actually think the universe has intentions, but copper,
| silicon, and dogs do sometimes make me question that belief, it
| is just a little suspicious that our species would have such
| loyal friends.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Watch the movie Alpha some time :)
| CPLX wrote:
| It's fun to watch the Anthropic principle develop organically
| in this sub-thread.
| dogben wrote:
| And it's relatively easy to make large pure silicon single
| crystal.
| kken wrote:
| I am really impressed by the clarity of the illustrations in the
| article.
| xg15 wrote:
| From the "Overview" page:
|
| > _Microchips - also referred to as integrated circuits - are
| considered to be among the greatest technological achievements of
| the last century. Their invention has paved the way for a digital
| revolution that keeps changing the world to the present day._
|
| ...
|
| > _The ENIAC computer from 1946 had over 17.000 vacuum tubes and
| suffered a tube failure on average every two days, which was
| time-consuming to troubleshoot and repair. With the invention of
| the transistor in 1947 by Bell Labs, the components became
| significantly smaller, but the transistors were still wired
| together individually. This reduced power consumption of those
| computers and their overall size, but not their wiring
| complexity. It was not before the invention of integrated
| circuits before computers became way more efficient and easier to
| operate and maintain._
|
| I find it on some level hilarious that one of the fundamental
| breakthroughs that allowed the technological revolution pick up
| speed and perception-wise cross the barrier from "sophisticated
| machinery" to "magic" was, in some sense, proper cable
| management.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| It's really /elimination/ of cable management. Essentially the
| same thing that makes printed circuit boards superior to wire
| wrapping. Turned a manual labor process into a
| (photo)lithographic process. Not that different from the
| replacement of hand-lettered manuscripts with the output of a
| printing press!
|
| In larger electronic and electromechanical systems, cables and
| connectors ("harnessing", collectively) are still major weak
| points.
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Just before the section on Moore's Law, it says this about
| silicon purity:
|
| > Electronic grade silicon (EG-Si): 99.9999999 pure ('nine nines
| pure') Thats one impurity atom in every 10.000.000 silicon atoms.
|
| I believe that should be 1.000.000.000 (10^9 atoms) to correspond
| to nine nines pure. Just as one impurity atom in every 100 (10^2)
| atoms would be 99% (two nines) pure.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I wonder where we would be if a printed copy of that post was
| delivered back to TI and Intel etc R&D labs 50 years ago.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-17 23:01 UTC)