Ingot or Boule? Making a Computer Chip Starts Here
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- Опубліковано 17 лип 2022
- Where do wafers come from?
(Yes, autoexposure sucks. It gets better.)
This was filmed at Semicon West, an industry trade show about all things in chip manufacturing.
Background image from Fritzchens Fritz: www.flickr.com/photos/1305612...
Featured @AnastasiInTech : • Video
The company is called YoungDo. This content was not sponsored.
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Welcome to the TechTechPotato (c) Dr. Ian Cutress
Ramblings about things related to Technology from an analyst for More Than Moore
#techtechpotato #siliconingot #siliconboule
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More Than Moore, as with other research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, which may include advertising on TTP. The companies that fall under this banner include Armari, Facebook, IBM, Linode, MediaTek, NordPass, Qualcomm. - Наука та технологія
The danger of having the wrong camera setting when you're on your own on the show floor. Will aim to do better in the future, sorry about that - tried my best to save it. Still thought I should post. Comments appreciated!
We have all done that at one time or another, glad you posted it still, Show your mistakes own them, its a reminder not to do it again.
Just claim you tried to make an HDR video
Thank you for making this content I find it interesting
Just blame youtube
The audio also has a lot of strange popping sounds
"...do a Linus with"
love it
Ikr, he's a verb now 😂
"..For you to do a linus with" Haha Anastasia is a great creator. This was certainly worth posting ian. No cares about the quality.. we just want the info. Cheers mate.
I would appreciate it if it weren't overexposed. Info is more important.
Would be nice to see a time-lapse of ingot growing for bought mono and poly silicon :)
Everything remotely connected to Linus is stupid beyond belief 🤢
😃 The ingot is bigger than me. I don't think I would be able to break it, luckily 😀
Linus could break it with ease!
I wouldn't count on it surviving if you lean on it and accidentally tip it over...
I love the casual "do a Linus with"
1:02 wow, that's 139 straight days of slowly pulling the crystal out of molten silicon. Seems to take a lot of energy to produce such an ingot.
yeah, now imagine a power failure or having a lock down and having to shut down production.
@@jeffrydemeyer5433 Ever heard of a UPS!!! Production doesn't stop during lock down you dipper, China handles this well, workers live on site.
@@markjackson7467 no, the amount of energy required to keep the silicon molten
@@somethingsnowing no that is thermal dynamics - heat loss you dipper. Study the laws of thermodynamics 2nd law. keeping it hot is not a problem. Moving it 3 metres is nothing to the work needed to move it 3000km to the show
@@markjackson7467 it may be easy to regulate the temp once everything is molten, but it still takes a lot of energy for 130 plus days of constant temp. also you are a fucking dickhead. You are a super position of fucking asshole and correct
It's crazy to think that that is a single crystal.
It is a single crystal, isn't it? And yet Ian said the ingots are polycrystalline. Did he get it wrong in the video?
@@derhundchen I thought it was single crystal, but Ian's knowledge on the subject makes mine look non-existent, so I'd always defer to what he says.
@@gerryjamesedwards1227 I still have my doubts as the process depicted looks like the CZ process, but I could be wrong.
@@derhundchen He's explaining that polycrystalline silicon is broken down and then formed into the single crystal ingot
Do a linus with !! Lol thar was hilarious
That would be expensive. I doubt they are ones that will be still used, but oh BOI I would not touch them either way.
It's an industry standard term.
There's companies out there that just do pulling??! I've been training my whole life for this job...
Just totally boule’d over by this!
"I can't bear to be near computers." "Why?" "My beloved uncle died falling into a silicon vat!" (But seriously, cool to see more about this core step. If you get a chance to show something about cutting the ingot and prepping the wafers, that could also be interesting!)
138 days of pulling? That's some serious stamina!
Hello Ian, it was very good to meet you at Semicon West. Thanks for sharing this video and I do appreciate it!!!
1:24 : Those pulled boules aren't actually polished (that's the natural outer melt) because they still need to undergo grinding to produce a perfect diameter cylindrical ingot as the next step.
With that time slowly drawing out the crystal I can see why power outages are a concern.
I saw such an ingot in person once and they are beautiful!
Cute cat at the end ☺️
This blew my mind... wonder how many they make at one time? How much power required? What kind of infrastructure is needed to maintain a 138 day process with 0 down time? It's honestly very impressive.
It's not just 'no downtime', it's 'maintain perfect conditions the entire duration'...
@@Steamrick Great point.
My highschool physics teacher took us into her lab where she was doing research. They used concave mirrors paired with 4 high power lamps-several kW(not sure what kind those were, maybe sodium) to focus the beams on the raw material right below the seed.
So expect dozens of kW just for the melting process. Everything else to provide stable enviroment and continuous work will take another few ...
And from the video I can recognize the induction furnace they use to melt the silicone, so most likely it takes hundreds of kW to melt it. But there has to be a lot of another equipment to keep it clean and in protected enviroment, most likely pressurised with inert gases to prevent oxidation and production of slag
A large company would have a large building filled with crystal pulling machines -- running over a hundred of them in parallel and producing maybe a thousand ingots each month. (A thousand ingots yield around 1.5 million wafers.) Each machine requires circa 50 kW of power in the steady state and several times as much during startup when it melts the fresh charge of silicon.
Also, typical pulling rates are around 30 mm / hour, so pulling itself takes a few days, plus unloading, loading and melting takes a few days. I do not know why this video quotes 100 times slower pulling rate -- perhaps this particular company does something unusual. Or, maybe it was just a miscommunication. There are some parts in these machines which move at 0.01 mm/minute, but they are not the crystal.
Me watching starting the video: "Oh wow a retro video from the Dr's early days"
Me watching near the end of the video: "oh ship, its a 2022 video 😅"
Did some animations a few years back of wafer processesd at MEMC. I could not believe investors needed to understand why fully process ready wafers are so expensive... if people only knew how many steps were involved and how at any point things can just destroy months/weeks of work.
Both the crucible and the seed crystal spin (oppo dirs), and the speed of spin + pull determines when the crystal "shoulders" from that conical top to the rod. Of course, polysilicon is an insulator, so there's also a dopant (like boron or antimony) in the melt. Sadly, it's not usually perfectly distributed, so you might only be sending the middle 100mm out of that 2000mm rod off to sawing after grinding, etc. Imagine having to grow a dozen of those and throw away, use for re-melt, or fit someone else's specs O:-) with the rest...
Man that cheesy loop at the end really brought me back.
I know what it is. That’s why I am here.
Glad to find your channel
thanks, these manufacturing techniques are quite the sight to behold
This is awesome...thanks for sharing Ian :)
Wow! About 139 days to grow the first one.
For reference 200,000 minutes is 139 days. No surprise that they're expensive.
Thank you!
I am interested in thermal cameras as a hobby. and the main material used for lenses in those wavelengths is Germanium. Also a semiconductor and it one line below Silicon on the periodic table. I do have a 150mm lens with a lens element at the front of that diameter too. So someone also grew such a giant mono crystalize ingot of Germanium to cut and grind lenses from. There are a few manufacturers for Germanium optics, but it's closely related to silicon lithography.
Surprisingly the most information you find online is from a Russian manufacturer.
'to do a linus with' ;) ;)
That's awesome.
Many thanks to Ian for reporting from the 8th dimension.
How much is one of those ingots worth again?
(You said sub-$100 per raw wafer, presumably 300mm - but how many wafers per ingot? I can look up that 300mm wafers are apparently 775 μm thick, but I don't know how much is wasted in the cutting process. There is no such thing as a waste-less cut, after all.)
@@aphenioxPDWtechnology it's crazier than that. They fire protons from a particle accelerator across the face causing them to embed themself into the silicon introducing flaws in the crystal structure. Then they heat the ingot and where the protons caused the flaws the wafer fractures off the ingot. Finally they're probably polished to the correct thickness.
@@JaenEngineering Cutting silicon with a particle accelerator was an idea which one startup company was promoting recently by sponsoring videos on MinutePhysics, with Bill Nye and through other channels. Some people warned that it was a scam. I do not know whether it was or not, but it is certainly not the process that is used in the industry -- real factories use wire saws with diamond slurry, like Vaes Joren have said.
Ahh the power of shiny silicon.
Now is the best time to learn manual exposure ;) (works best for indoors)
What amazes me is how they can hang 350Kg on that little spindle.
200,000 minutes is over 138 days.
you need a cameraman Doc. great video as always
So it takes about 140 days to make that ingot. That's insane!
Its quite stupid because they waste so much time cooling.
Ian - love your work, but you need to hire someone who isn't red-blue colourblind to do colour grading on your video... I'm not talking about the over-exposure. I'm talking about the bizarre orange colour temperature that makes it look like poorly processed 8mm film from the 60's.
I tried to grade it so it wouldn't look like crap, and the raw footage is a lot worse. I checked with wendell, he simply said 'garbage in, garbage out', which is fair.
1:01 that's about 4.5 months, I guess they pull many ingots simultaneously
Potato man - potato cam!
Nice video !
Can't wait till I'll be able to go to this kind of show myself :)
So 200,000 minutes of pull… roughly 139 days. Over 4 months?! Is that right? They grow it for that long?! Jesus 😂
The ingots have a security feature to hack autoexposure
I think the heat is getting to Ian with all this talk of his 17 inches ;)
138 days of pull for a 2M long crystal , that cant be cheep
Should have eaten it right there, Ian!
Ian's looking just a little paler than usual. Must be the lack of sun in the UK. ;P
Very cool to see the "potatoes" the chips we know and love come from.
Not only camera but sound is clicky as well..
Wow silicon, pure silicon is relatively light! 350 kilos for this huge boule!
is there a written version of this? I'm kinda interested to know more about the larger "wafer" that is being used as a carrier. Are they consumed in the process? At what point does it come off? does it come off?
I suddenly have this inexplicable urge to watch T2 again 🙂
Is "active interposer silicon" limited to 12 inch? I read in between the lines that Intel is using repeater circuits within the interposer silicon. Or do the impurity level of 17 inch ingots allow active circuits?
Wow. I did not know they could make them that big. Makes me imagine If one day someone could make a giant single CPU/GPU using an entire slice of that silicon ingot.
Check Ian's video called something like "Your next CPU is the size of your head". Cerebras already has something like that, and it's amazing
Get a grey card to lock down WB and exposure. I bet you can customise a button for custom WB. ;)
2:22 isn't that monocrystalline? Is polycrystalline even used anywhere apart from solar panels?
there's also slight sound cracking fyi
Anastasia and Linus both jabbed in one video with a wacky camera. The black mirror was real!
How does it end?
What comes next?
I like how the ingot is perfectly exposed but everything else is screwy
how does one grow an ingot as thin as a wafer and very wide? Then one could skip a step and manufacture much quicker.
Why does the shorter one weight about the same as the taller one? Is the shorter one much wider?
So when you took a chunk out out of the column was it a megabite or a gigabite?
Or perhaps maybe several kilo-bites
A potato from chips are made of :)
Okay, why was this video's thumbnail Series 5 of Doctor Who?? Hahaha
How much would an ingot like that cost?
wouldnt be monocristaline instead of policristaline?
I have that machine
A black slab in a black cube in a black box.■■■
Thank you. 😈
0:56 138.9 days?
Not even a milligram of contamination in the tall one.
I hear lake mead due to the drought won't be able to meet water demand of TSMC fab in US, will need a $10 billion+ pipeline and desal plant
We need a plan like yesterday. These political administrations just point the finger while stuffing their pockets you'd need the water and diesel just for concrete and power. Estimate doesn't even include: Air filtration, wastewater treatment, or any networking.
@@darelsmith2825 I bet they build one before Flint has clean safe water and I'm an Ozzie who knows this
They have friends and family in construction business. Nothing to do with actual production of Microchips. NXP, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia get zero. Kids pick up the billions of Dollars of crushing debt.
I know what this is because I watched a Asianometry video on the subject
buy atomos or any 2nd screen than ian
Are there any cats in your personal life ? ( I mean people tend to say that they own a cat I believe it's other way around, the cat decides she wants to share it's life with you) ;-)
Why polycrystaline? Aren't ingots a single crystal?
The pre-cursor material is usually poly-Si. The ingots themselves are a single crystal.
@@TechTechPotato I think somewhere around the middle of the video you said the wafers are poly. Where you talked about how they need a carrier. Did I misunderstand or did you misspeak?
@@SwordQuake2 I believe what Ian meant to say is that the large boule, which is meant for carriers, is not monocrystalline, because it doesn't need to be.
Restated another way: The carriers are made of silicon, so that it behaves largely the same as the wafer, but since it doesn't need to be made into chips, it doesn't need to be monocrystalline.
Jesus and I thought I looked albino on camera!
and your mic is popping and peaking...
just do it with a phone, it'll probably be better
no one sees the mistake of 200.000 minutes - threre are only 20.000 minutes pulling time
ok this grade needs 10 times