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How Microchips Work
- 0wis 3y agoI 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/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/
- nairboon 3y agoThere is also the NandGame: https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/
- lencastre 3y agoInteresting, Turing Complete is also from NAND to microcomputer. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/
- gdevic 3y agoI loved the article! Spot on and just the right depth for the article size (I am a CPU architect).
- ww520 3y agoSilicon 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoSilicon 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal%E2%80%93Grove_model
- stavros 3y agoHuh, it's as if the universe was built to make computers out of.
- eternauta3k 3y agoIt 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)...
- bee_rider 3y agoClay 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 3y agoWatch the movie Alpha some time :)
- CPLX 3y agoIt’s fun to watch the Anthropic principle develop organically in this sub-thread.
- dogben 3y agoAnd it's relatively easy to make large pure silicon single crystal.
- namibj 3y agoLow band gap is actually detrimental for transistors. The more spare band gap, the higher temperature you can operate them at.
- kken 3y agoI am really impressed by the clarity of the illustrations in the article.
- xg15 3y agoFrom 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 3y agoIt'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.
- agumonkey 3y agoI guess with scale, the tiniests of details become the bottleneck :)
- gshubert17 3y agoJust 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 3y agoI 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.
- ExAr 3y agoHi everyone! I am the author of the website exclusivearchitecture.com. Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback - so rewarding to see! I have already made some corrections to a detail where I gave an incorrect number with the "nine-nines-purity" and it should be 1 impurity in 1.000.000.000 silicon atoms. Thanks gshubert17 for pointing that out. I have noticed that my website is currently down with a timeout - sorry for that. I hope this is going to be resolved asap. Cheers! MK
- gslin 3y agohttps://archive.is/hYvUp https://archive.is/hYvUp for most contents.