Ingot or Boule? Making a Computer Chip Starts Here

Рет қаралды 23,183

2 жыл бұрын

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.

Пікірлер: 142

@TechTechPotato 2 жыл бұрын

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!

@OldPoi77 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@plasma06 2 жыл бұрын

Just claim you tried to make an HDR video

@Brenna_stubbs 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you for making this content I find it interesting

@tortoro 2 жыл бұрын

Just blame youtube

@coder543 2 жыл бұрын

The audio also has a lot of strange popping sounds

@christophermullins7163 2 жыл бұрын

"..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.

@ArthursHD 2 жыл бұрын

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 :)

@cocosloan3748 Жыл бұрын

Everything remotely connected to Linus is stupid beyond belief 🤢

@darkmann12 2 жыл бұрын

"...do a Linus with" love it

@AshT8524 2 жыл бұрын

Ikr, he's a verb now 😂

@DrakiniteOfficial 2 жыл бұрын

I love the casual "do a Linus with"

@gerryjamesedwards1227 2 жыл бұрын

It's crazy to think that that is a single crystal.

@derhundchen 2 жыл бұрын

It is a single crystal, isn't it? And yet Ian said the ingots are polycrystalline. Did he get it wrong in the video?

@gerryjamesedwards1227 2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@derhundchen 2 жыл бұрын

@@gerryjamesedwards1227 I still have my doubts as the process depicted looks like the CZ process, but I could be wrong.

@AerynGaming 2 жыл бұрын

@@derhundchen He's explaining that polycrystalline silicon is broken down and then formed into the single crystal ingot

@cjpartridge 2 жыл бұрын

There's companies out there that just do pulling??! I've been training my whole life for this job...

@Asianometry 2 жыл бұрын

Just totally boule’d over by this!

@ProjectPhysX 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@jeffrydemeyer5433 2 жыл бұрын

yeah, now imagine a power failure or having a lock down and having to shut down production.

@markjackson7467 2 жыл бұрын

@@jeffrydemeyer5433 Ever heard of a UPS!!! Production doesn't stop during lock down you dipper, China handles this well, workers live on site.

@somethingsnowing 2 жыл бұрын

@@markjackson7467 no, the amount of energy required to keep the silicon molten

@markjackson7467 2 жыл бұрын

@@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

@somethingsnowing 2 жыл бұрын

@@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

@chaitanyakulkarni6416 2 жыл бұрын

Do a linus with !! Lol thar was hilarious

@deilusi 2 жыл бұрын

That would be expensive. I doubt they are ones that will be still used, but oh BOI I would not touch them either way.

@qwertyferix 2 жыл бұрын

It's an industry standard term.

@tomdchi12 2 жыл бұрын

"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!)

@jaeahn816 2 жыл бұрын

Hello Ian, it was very good to meet you at Semicon West. Thanks for sharing this video and I do appreciate it!!!

@AnastasiInTech 2 жыл бұрын

😃 The ingot is bigger than me. I don't think I would be able to break it, luckily 😀

@KabukeeJo 2 жыл бұрын

Linus could break it with ease!

@Steamrick 2 жыл бұрын

I wouldn't count on it surviving if you lean on it and accidentally tip it over...

@JohnDuthie 2 жыл бұрын

138 days of pulling? That's some serious stamina!

@lucysluckyday 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@unvergebeneid 2 жыл бұрын

I saw such an ingot in person once and they are beautiful!

@christopherpetersen342 2 жыл бұрын

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...

@Hector52441 2 жыл бұрын

Cute cat at the end ☺️

@EthelbertCoyote 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@Graham_Rule 2 жыл бұрын

With that time slowly drawing out the crystal I can see why power outages are a concern.

@BlackBirdMax 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@Steamrick 2 жыл бұрын

It's not just 'no downtime', it's 'maintain perfect conditions the entire duration'...

@BlackBirdMax 2 жыл бұрын

@@Steamrick Great point.

@Fr4kTh1s 2 жыл бұрын

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 ...

@Fr4kTh1s 2 жыл бұрын

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

@cogoid Жыл бұрын

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.

@TrueRegulators 2 жыл бұрын

thanks, these manufacturing techniques are quite the sight to behold

@mohdjibly6184 2 жыл бұрын

This is awesome...thanks for sharing Ian :)

@christiankrueger8048 Жыл бұрын

Thank you!

@scarletspidernz 2 жыл бұрын

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 😅"

@ashishpatel350 2 жыл бұрын

That's awesome.

@robert-wr9xt 8 ай бұрын

I know what it is. That’s why I am here. Glad to find your channel

@spiralout112 2 жыл бұрын

Man that cheesy loop at the end really brought me back.

@Steamrick 2 жыл бұрын

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.)

@JaenEngineering Жыл бұрын

@@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.

@cogoid Жыл бұрын

@@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.

@TheCgOrion 2 жыл бұрын

Wow! About 139 days to grow the first one.

@DrewryPope 2 жыл бұрын

'to do a linus with' ;) ;)

@MrMartinSchou 2 жыл бұрын

For reference 200,000 minutes is 139 days. No surprise that they're expensive.

@ghjong001 2 жыл бұрын

Many thanks to Ian for reporting from the 8th dimension.

@Veptis Жыл бұрын

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.

@AtaGunZ 2 жыл бұрын

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?

@reinerfranke5436 2 жыл бұрын

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?

@Dragonheng 2 жыл бұрын

Ahh the power of shiny silicon.

@TechLevelUpOfficial 2 жыл бұрын

you need a cameraman Doc. great video as always

@alibizzle2010 2 жыл бұрын

Potato man - potato cam!

@AlexandreRacine 2 жыл бұрын

Now is the best time to learn manual exposure ;) (works best for indoors)

@ArthursHD 2 жыл бұрын

2:22 isn't that monocrystalline? Is polycrystalline even used anywhere apart from solar panels?

@eugkra33 2 жыл бұрын

200,000 minutes is over 138 days.

@greenprotag 2 жыл бұрын

So when you took a chunk out out of the column was it a megabite or a gigabite?

@greenprotag 2 жыл бұрын

Or perhaps maybe several kilo-bites

@RealLifeTech187 2 жыл бұрын

So it takes about 140 days to make that ingot. That's insane!

@snorttroll4379 11 ай бұрын

Its quite stupid because they waste so much time cooling.

@Tuckerslam 2 жыл бұрын

Should have eaten it right there, Ian!

@deviljelly3 2 жыл бұрын

How much would an ingot like that cost?

@campbellmorrison8540 5 ай бұрын

What amazes me is how they can hang 350Kg on that little spindle.

@St0RM33 2 жыл бұрын

Not only camera but sound is clicky as well..

@user-yc5fq9bv3u 2 жыл бұрын

there's also slight sound cracking fyi

@alibizzle2010 2 жыл бұрын

I think the heat is getting to Ian with all this talk of his 17 inches ;)

@vladsnape6408 Жыл бұрын

1:01 that's about 4.5 months, I guess they pull many ingots simultaneously

@ZylonFPV 2 жыл бұрын

So 200,000 minutes of pull… roughly 139 days. Over 4 months?! Is that right? They grow it for that long?! Jesus 😂

@marvintpandroid2213 2 жыл бұрын

138 days of pull for a 2M long crystal , that cant be cheep

@nycameleon 2 жыл бұрын

The ingots have a security feature to hack autoexposure

@AleksandrStrizhevskiy 8 ай бұрын

Why does the shorter one weight about the same as the taller one? Is the shorter one much wider?

@xlinnaeus 2 жыл бұрын

Okay, why was this video's thumbnail Series 5 of Doctor Who?? Hahaha

@noenken 2 жыл бұрын

Get a grey card to lock down WB and exposure. I bet you can customise a button for custom WB. ;)

@linuxgeex 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@TechTechPotato 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@andrewmcfarland57 2 жыл бұрын

I suddenly have this inexplicable urge to watch T2 again 🙂

@alfredzanini 2 жыл бұрын

Nice video ! Can't wait till I'll be able to go to this kind of show myself :)

@snorttroll4379 11 ай бұрын

how does one grow an ingot as thin as a wafer and very wide? Then one could skip a step and manufacture much quicker.

@benjaminoechsli1941 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@wololo10 9 ай бұрын

wouldnt be monocristaline instead of policristaline?

@nikolausluhrs 2 жыл бұрын

I like how the ingot is perfectly exposed but everything else is screwy

@subhradeepsharma 2 жыл бұрын

I have that machine

@timarc9895 Жыл бұрын

Wow silicon, pure silicon is relatively light! 350 kilos for this huge boule!

@miinyoo Ай бұрын

Anastasia and Linus both jabbed in one video with a wacky camera. The black mirror was real! How does it end? What comes next?

@cannesahs Жыл бұрын

A potato from chips are made of :)

@johndelong5574 2 жыл бұрын

A black slab in a black cube in a black box.■■■

@RobAryeeArc 2 жыл бұрын

0:56 138.9 days?

@ToySeeker 4 ай бұрын

Thank you. 😈

@KabukeeJo 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@DrakiniteOfficial 2 жыл бұрын

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

@shanent5793 2 жыл бұрын

Not even a milligram of contamination in the tall one.

@markjackson7467 2 жыл бұрын

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

@darelsmith2825 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@markjackson7467 2 жыл бұрын

@@darelsmith2825 I bet they build one before Flint has clean safe water and I'm an Ozzie who knows this

@darelsmith2825 2 жыл бұрын

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.

@monchiabbad 2 жыл бұрын

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) ;-)

@zunriya 2 жыл бұрын

buy atomos or any 2nd screen than ian

@Brenna_stubbs 2 жыл бұрын

I know what this is because I watched a Asianometry video on the subject

@SwordQuake2 2 жыл бұрын

Why polycrystaline? Aren't ingots a single crystal?

@TechTechPotato 2 жыл бұрын

The pre-cursor material is usually poly-Si. The ingots themselves are a single crystal.

@SwordQuake2 2 жыл бұрын

@@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?

@789654123654789 2 жыл бұрын

@@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.