How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
blog.robertelder.org
How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
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Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#2After all that hard work, sell it at a few cents per chip.
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#3As a film photography enthusiast, I love the parallels between making a chip and film development. I wonder if film developing was the original inspiration
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#4Nice illustrations, though step 16 is pretty much "Draw the rest of the F** owl."
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#5As a film photography enthusiast, I love the parallels between making a chip and film development. I wonder if film developing was the original inspiration
Photo etching is used for all kinds of things including making plates for printing, I'd guess that's the more direct ancestor.
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#6If you're into this, Huygens Optics has an awesome series where he builds a wafer stepper at home. His is a little less advanced than Sam Zeloofs but the videos are way better -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#7For a real case of someone making integrated circuits at home, this boy did it: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ for real.
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#8I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#9Nice illustrations, though step 16 is pretty much "Draw the rest of the F** owl."
I'm pretty sure producing the monocrystalline ingot with seven 9's purity also counts as the "rest of the owl", along with basically every other step in this guide. I'm not even convinced that the sawing step is simple – thermal stresses, limitations, impurities, tool hardness and dimensional accuracy concerns, minimising material losses, etc. (I loved his butter knife).
Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
#10I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???
Asking how to work in chips is kind of like asking how to be an engineer -- there are a million sub-specialties so lots of paths.
Generally the degrees are Electrical Engineering, with classes along the lines of https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... (note that's from 2003, just an example)
There's also a ton of physics, and chemical and industrial engineering in the process steps.