Introduction: This review is based on the contents of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the second part of "Amazing Chips". Mr. Wang Jian systematically introduces the entire process of the birth, manufacturing, packaging, and testing of a chip.
Everyone knows that chips come from sand. Sand is continuously purified to make wafers. The wafers go through steps such as deposition, photolithography, corrosion, and stacking to become mother wafers that carry dozens, hundreds, or even more chips. They then go through processes such as ATE scanning, chip profiling, packaging, and post-packaging testing (FT) before finally becoming what we call chips.
From chip design to chip verification to tapeout to wafer return verification, packaging and testing, there are so many links that it is dizzying. It requires a large number of smart engineers in the fields of design, verification, testing, packaging, SI/PI and other software and hardware to work in depth. At the same time, it also requires various supports from semiconductor equipment vendors, manufacturers, EDA tool vendors, etc.
Finally, chips are produced for customers. Tapeout chips usually need ECO correction, continuous iteration, and may need to be re-striped. After production, the chips need to be tested for yield and balance performance and power consumption. There is a lot of work to be done.
Finally, qualified chips are bought by customers and made into various electronic products. As time goes by, chips gradually age and malfunction. Therefore, chips must undergo aging tests, using short-term pressure to simulate long-term aging scenarios, so as to provide customers with a time guide for stable operation. And this data is only probabilistic data, not accurate data. Some chips may age very quickly in 1 year. For example, circuits with defective analog circuit design usually age very quickly, and customers with severe leakage will also be damaged quickly. These accidental and inevitable factors result in the life of the chip being only an estimated value.
However, if there is no problem with the design, a chip can usually run without failure for a period longer than the nominal data of the chip manufacturer itself. In today's society, technology is advancing rapidly, and chips are usually replaced by better-performing chips before they break down. After the chip is replaced, it is recycled. It can be expected that chip recycling is a new topic. Some CPUs contain some gold elements, which will be used for alchemy, which is undoubtedly a waste. However, in the current era of increasing electronic waste, how to turn waste into treasure is a topic worth thinking about, but it seems that there is no good idea at present.
Wang Jian's book helped me further clarify the details of chip design, manufacturing and testing, and also gave me some additional inspiration. In my review, I made some additional comments on chip aging, mainly to provide readers with some additional perspectives. I thank Wang Jian for his popular science, which has benefited me a lot.
提升卡
变色卡
千斤顶
This is basically the idea behind the growth of forum user levels.
京公网安备 11010802033920号
