Inside Intel Fabrication Lab

On a very fine and boring day, I decided to do something and went down to infiltrate the Intel Penang high tech clean room facility . ^ ^  V

Taking a pictures of the receptionist hall there . . . and purposely blurred the pics bit 

Given a pass card by my escort. ^ ^ Unfortunately, with this pass card, I cannot "venture" into other department.  Erhemm ... now the shooting spree begins  !

For those of you who are coming from non electronics engineering background, let me briefly described the clean room. A clean room basically a room which is so " clean " that, it is safer to operate in there than to operate in surgery room because there are virtually non - existing particles inside a clean room. It is mainly usually applied in semiconductor (microchip) manufacturing which you can see in the following pictures or any other field appliances which needs as little as enviromental contamination as possible .

 So now you might wondering, why manufacturing the microchip needs to be manufactured in this  sterile enviroment ?

A very good question, we might want to look back into the famous Moore's Law stated by one of Intel's co - founder. 

"The number of transistors inside a microprocessor will be doubled every 18 months"

So what does that means? 

It means that in order to fit in the relatively same sized processor with increasing number of transistors, we need to minimizes the transistor sizes smaller and smaller and when it get too small, even a speck of dust can damages the whole microchip pathway circuits, rendering it useless. It is such a waste cause each can be sold for RM 1000++ which sends the manager headache whenever this type of problems occurred. However with all that sterile enviroment, there still will be possibility where the return yield will generates lesser than expected yield (means there will be some microchip damages). Each of these chips will be tested to ensure all the components are working correctly.

Befre going inside the clean room, we might need to wear a jumpsuit (bunny suit) to prevent any contaminated particles floating in clean room later and also given an "air shower" to blow off any remaining particles and ionizing the suits

Now we moved on to first part of semi con fabrications : Lithography

When you were small kids, do you ever remembered you take out magnifying glass and shoot the concentrated rays on the helpless ants ? Now, this techniques is put into good use in a methods called lithography. It is in simplest explaination, using the UV lights to creating the patterns on the microchips as seen in above  pictures. The things above is called a photomask and it is used to create a pattern on our minuscule microchip. It is pretty amazing to see how that big patterns can be carved into smaller sized patterns using the simplest techniques. In microchip there is a substances called photoresist and if shone with UV lights, it will be weakened and can be easily peeled off by caustics chemical baths leaving the trenches which are the pathway of the microprocessor circuits. You can see the oversimplifications of this process in following diagrams. 

As I am told, the room is lighted in yellow during lithography process to avoid the interferences with UV rays. It makes my eyes a bit "colour disoriented" after I step out from there. 

And it makes a really nice ambiances for candlelight dinner . :P 

Now let's move to next part : Etching and Diffusion

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Besides lithography, there are 2 parts of the process are equally important : "etching" and "diffusion".

Etching is a process where you peel off certain layers to create a new additional pathways and diffusion is the intentionally depositing substrates to make the certain ares to be either conduct charges or semi conduct charges. Both of this steps important, as the microchip designs become more and more complex, hence it will need more and more layers and pathways to stack up all in already confined spaces. A microchip may need to undergoes hundreds of etch-diffusion cycles hundreds of times into the desired patterns.
Notes that, the machine in left pics is responsible for etching and the machine on right pics is responsible for diffusion.

You might asked how complex is the microchips layers ?

This complex but this is only one of few parts of hundred layers inside the microchip. 

(Note: Edited this pictures excluding measurement and type of "top secret" substrates used to prevent certain corporate espionage )

An engineer is doing some calibrations and maintenance on this machines such as concentrations of the chemicals, the LOS of the targeted bleaching,etc ... [It just terms to operate this machines].As this machines is multi - million (billion ?) ringgit machines , he had to concentrate real hard on the task, one wrong steps, the machine is gone for good .

As you can see , metal free tool is the tools that are need to be ensures that the microchip substrate are completely free from any metal contaminative before feeding inside the machines. Also with many batches of microprocessor, it will easily to get mixed up. But fortunately, it has nil chance of happening because the transport is fully automated which leaves the production engineering breathing heavy relief  

To prevent any decontamination , the microprocessor wafer are carried inside this container box to prevent any ESD (Electro Static Discharge) and internal generations of particles. Each of this container can hold 25 wafers and it maintains the wafer in sterile environment. It is heavy therefore it is carried around by the robotics arms.

The wafers that are stored in this semi vacuum room

The wonder of microprocessor design ? It is small as your thumbnail but contains millions of transistors and not to forgetting mentions that the pathway (wires) that connects them. And it can computes millions upon millions of calculations per seconds and lest forget to mention, it is profitable  multi billion business worldwide. 

And by the way , say hi to Uncle Wang who is checking his G Mail and giving an nice entourage! :)