Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#2Lovely stuff. I wonder how close you could get to making this stuff in your garage now, given a silicon wafer and maybe a vacuum chamber. (I imagine the etching chemicals would probably make you unpopular with your neighbors...)
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#3Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#4Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Not sure what you mean by not changing much. Those are probably NMOS circuits. We use CMOS today.
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#5Lovely stuff. I wonder how close you could get to making this stuff in your garage now, given a silicon wafer and maybe a vacuum chamber. (I imagine the etching chemicals would probably make you unpopular with your neighbors...)
She didn't do anything remotely this complicated, but a few years ago Jeri Ellsworth did do a couple videos of "homemade" ICs.
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#6Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Uhm no, absolutely not. The basic operational principle remained the same, but absolutely everything has been changed many times over. Trillions of dollars were invested to make it happen.
The only constant is probably that it is still made on a silicon wafer. But even this wafer changed a lot, and I am not talking about its size.
Would you also compare a horse carriage to a Tesla?
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#7Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Uhm no, absolutely not. The basic operational principle remained the same, but absolutely everything has been changed many times over. Trillions of dollars were invested to make it happen. The only constant is probably that it is still made on a silicon wafer. But even this wafer changed a lot, and I am not talking about its size. Would you also compare a horse carriage to a Tesla?
The wafer is a slab of polysilicon, and has been that way for a long time. Most of those trillions you mention were invested to make the lithography smaller, which is how you get more transistors into the same die.
Edit: silicon, not poly silicon. Not sure why I said poly there...
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#8Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Not sure what you mean by not changing much. Those are probably NMOS circuits. We use CMOS today.
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Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhm no, absolutely not. The basic operational principle remained the same, but absolutely everything has been changed many times over. Trillions of dollars were invested to make it happen. The only constant is probably that it is still made on a silicon wafer. But even this wafer changed a lot, and I am not talking about its size. Would you also compare a horse carriage to a Tesla?
The wafer is a slab of polysilicon, and has been that way for a long time. Most of those trillions you mention were invested to make the lithography smaller, which is how you get more transistors into the same die. Edit: silicon, not poly silicon. Not sure why I said poly there...
No, simply no.
ICs are made of monocrystalline silicon, not polysilicon. There have been massive efforts to understand how to make it cleaner (internal gettering) and how to get wafer mechanics under control (Nitrogen doping). That does not even touch the changes in production technology to go from 10 mm Wafers to 300 mm Wafers. (You just make them larger, right...)
A lot of new concepts and materials have been introduced to ICs during the last decades. Especially since the 130 nm ground rule, lithography has not been the main limiter. Examples: Copper, Tungsten, Diffusion barriers, Silicide, Strained Silicon, High-k, metal gates, finfet, 3d integration etc...
Re: Inside the Intel 1405: die photos of a shift register memory from 1970
#10Really interesting how chips haven't changed much for almost 50 years - except for getting (much) smaller. This could have been a modern die photo except for the scale of things...
Uhm no, absolutely not. The basic operational principle remained the same, but absolutely everything has been changed many times over. Trillions of dollars were invested to make it happen. The only constant is probably that it is still made on a silicon wafer. But even this wafer changed a lot, and I am not talking about its size. Would you also compare a horse carriage to a Tesla?
Would you also compare a horse carriage to a Tesla?
I think it would be closer to a comparison between a car engine in the 1900s and one today. Lots of differences, but the basic principles remain the same and if you were to give someone from one time period a part from the other, they'd easily be able to see what it was.