How a rock becomes a smartphone cpu

1. Quartz

Your smartphone processor started its journey in Spain’s north -western corner Meena SerabalA quartz mine near the city of Santiago Day Compostala. Quartz – or more technically, silicon dioxide or silica – is the main ingredient of sand. But in Serbal, it can come into huge pieces twice the width of a smartphone. Mine operator Feroglobe Runs an automatic system to sort the silica to size. After washing and treating the pieces, the big people visit the Atlantic coast for the next step in the journey.

2. Silicon metal

after One hour by truckQuartz arrives at mini-bolder SabonA 125,000 square meter factory in the coastal province of Koruna. The quartz will be mixed with dehydrated wooden chips here and will be heated to 1,500 to 2,000 degrees Celsius in a trio of electric-arc furnaces using large-scale electrodes. Invented at the plant in the 1990sInside the furnace, there is a reaction that rip oxygen from the silica and stick it to the carbon with wood. The result is silicone metal and carbon monoxide.

3. Pure polysilicon

The resulting silicon metal is about 98 percent pure, and it is not quite good. To become a microprocessor, it must be at least 99.999999 percent pure, which will require some very powerful chemistry. So it’s closed Waker kemyBergusen, in Germany. Here, the metal passes through what the semence process is: it takes a bath in hydrochloric acid and reacts to forming a liquid called hydrogen gas and trichlorosylon. Any impurities will be in liquid, then run through a multistap distillation process that separates the pure trichlorosylon from any unwanted. Once the required purity reaches, the reaction is reversed: at 1,150 ° C, trichlorosilain is reacted with hydrogen, which is to deposit multiple crystals of silicon, called polysilicon, and consequently to suck hydrochloric acid gas. Polysilicon makes thick rods around the heating elements. Once it cools down and the reaction is removed from the chamber, polycylicon is broken for shipping.

4. Silicon wafers

Ultrapure silicon is made of multiple crystals in various bends. But microprocessors should be made from the same crystal. Therefore the material can migrate to Sharman, Texas, where Globalwafers recently opened the US $ 3.5 billion silicon-verge plant. Here polycylicon is called Czochralski (CZ) method. In a high -purity quartz crucible, polycylicon is heated to about 1,425 ° C and until melting. Then a seed crystal with an accurate crystal orientation is immersed in the melt, gradually drawn upwards, and rotated. Do all that Absolutely Okay, and you will draw an ingestion of pure, crystalline silicone which is 300 millimeters and several meters long. Specific saw then slices this column of semiconductor purity in wafers less than 1 millimeter. The wafers are cleaned, polished and sometimes processed before going to wafer fabs.

5. Processed wafers

Now it has left for Tenon, where it has left for Tenon, TSMC Fab 18 These wafers will be converted into the latest smartphone processor. It is a highly complex process, including some of the most complex and expensive equipment on the planet, which includes EUV lithography systems, which can cost more than $ 300 million each. In Fab 18, each wafer will pass through months of accurate torture to produce transistors and wiring that make processors. Extreme ultraviolet radiation will print the pattern on it, the warm ion will Ram in its surface, the exact chemical reactions will build parts of a atomic layer at a time, the acid will remove the nanometer-scal structures, and the metals will remove the electrochemical plate parts and will be polished from the distance. Results: A wafer filled with similar processor.

6. Packaged chips

These are amazing as these processors, you cannot use them as this. They need to be packed first. For our silicon, it’s going to happen ASE facility in PenangMalaysia A package provides chip with mechanical protection, is a way of removing heat, and a way to connect the micrometer-scal parts of the chip to the millimeter-scale of the circuit board. To do this, the wafers are first included in the chips. Then the short balls of the mixing, some are attached to the chips, only the tens of the micrometer. The bumps of the mill are aligned with the respective parts of the package, and the two parts are melted together. It is becoming more normal for several pieces of silicon to be integrated within the same package, either stacking each other or is called an interpocer on a separate piece next to each other. Follow the other stages of the process, and the packed part is now ready for its next step.

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