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– I’ve spent most of my career
trying to get into a chip fab.
Samsung’s a hard no,
Global Foundries was open to it in person,
then ghosted me when I followed up
and Intel has said no to me,
every single time I’ve asked except one.
Honestly, I’m pretty overwhelmed today
because I’m gonna be
taking three major items
off my bucket list.
I’m visiting Israel for the first time,
I’m gonna be going deep
into the heart of Intel’s
state of the art fab 28
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(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
– My tour guide today
couldn’t be more experienced.
Dani is the Co-General Manager
of Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing
and started at Intel working
in fab 8 in Jerusalem
back when state of the
art was the Pentium one.
Microprocessor fabrication experts
can safely skip ahead a couple of minutes,
but for everyone else,
let’s run through the basics.
Every CPU die,
every one of these starts
with a sliced up silicon ingot
like the one right here.
These are astonishingly pure
and are exactly 300
millimeters in diameter.
If they went in any smaller,
they’d increase waste around the edges.
I mean look at this,
obviously this is not
gonna be a working chip
if it’s cut off by the edge of the circle.
Fun fact by the way,
the reason that they run
the non-working edge dies
through all of the same
fabrication processes
is that it actually
improves the uniformity
of the full chips next to them.
Consistency is key in CPU manufacturing,
because even though we talk
about these chips in terms like
14 or 10 nanometer,
the components that make
up these transistors
are much smaller,
like on the order of less than a nanometer
and a tiny error or contaminant
in any of the hundreds
of manufacturing steps
means that that die, he no worky.
I mean it’s a modern miracle
that any of this is possible
and is basically unheard of
to get an entire 300 millimeter
wafer through the fab
without a single defective dye on it.
Before it can be sold however,
it needs to be transformed
from melted sand like this
into the brains of your PC.
Silicon you see is neither an insulator,
nor is it a true conductor.
So to create all the little transistors
or switches that control current flow
through the logic gates
and other microstructures on the chip,
the wafer needs to undergo many processes.
Implantation fires dopant ions
into the surface of the silicon
to alter its electrical characteristics.
So depending on what kinds
of ions are implanted,
say phosphorous or boron,
you might be laying the
groundwork for an n-type
or a p-type transistor.
This determines if the voltage
is negative or positive
to open the gate.
Diffusion furnaces create
new combined materials
by exposing the wafer to various gases
at up to 100s of degrees celsius.
Lithography,
is one of the easiest steps
to understand conceptually,
but also one of the most important.
Within a single processor die,
there are billions of transistors
and literally kilometers of tiny wires,
but they’re obviously far
too small to build them
and solder them together by hand.
So the wafer gets coated with
a material called photoresist,
then exposed to UV light through a mask.
Anywhere the light
passes through the mask,
the photo resist will be removed,
allowing the exposed
portions to be processed.
Then it’s quite literally
rinse and repeat.
Nikon, who does a lot more
than make cameras by the way
has a great diagram on their
site demonstrating this.
So one such potential
processing step is etching
where the goal is to
selectively remove material
from the top of the wafer,
creating trenches in it.
These can be overfilled with
copper to create interconnects
then the excess gets
removed by polishing it off
using brushes and slurry
in a process called Chemical
Mechanical Planarization.
There are different kinds of etching
but we can talk about that
more once we get inside.
(upbeat music)
This is it.
Point no return, here we go.
There’s no card or anything
just, yeah it’s very,
good high security.
Time to learn the procedure.
This is great, this is very inclusive,
they have child size
gloves for people like me.
This is crazy.
So these are not the gloves
we wear in the clean room,
these are the gloves
to put on the stuff that we’re
gonna wear in the clean room
that will be contaminated
that then we will get rid of after.
Wow,
man I’m looking sharp.
Now time for stage two.
basically we grab have a couple of little
foot cover doodads here and
this room is pressurized
and the idea is that
these, these aren’t like
filtered like the clean
room or anything like that
but by having a little bit
of pressure in this room,
we keep the super stanky
air from outside, out.
So when you walk into here,
you feel this gust of air coming out
and then what you’re supposed to do
is you’re supposed to have
dirty stuff on this side
and then clean stuff on this side.
So I gotta put my little booties on,
did I do it right?
Yep.
Okay so there’s more
positive pressure in here
blowing that way, right?
– Yes.
– So the idea then I guess is
the air gets cleaner and cleaner as we go.
Okay, what do I do?
– You start with the hood.
– Yes.
– [Staff] Start from bot, top to bottom.
– Top to bottom.
– Yeah.
– Okay, why do we go top to bottom?
So that the dust won’t fall
off our top onto our bottom.
– Better that it’ll suit
into the bunny suits.
– Oh, got it.
‘Cause that’s how the garments overlap.
I have a feeling our audio is not gonna be
our finest ever for this video.
Ladies and gentlemen
you’ll have to bear with us
cuz my microphone is already under
three layers of fabric now.
(upbeat music)
– We’re out of the gown room into the fab.
– Into the fab.
– And it’s already crazy.
Can you see these like
robots on tracks up here.
Apparently these are taking the foups,
and I check that is actually
what’s called F O U P,
which is 25 wafers.
So that’s 25 slices of the
original silicon ingot.
That foup we just saw, that
little robot on the track
had hundreds of CPU dies in it,
but we don’t know how
many of them are good
because they’re actually
on their way to sorting
where not only will they
determine if they work,
but they’ll determine how well.
So is it a core I7 or a core I9.
Every guy wants to live,
it sounds like a nerdy James Bond film.
I love it.
(upbeat music)
Oh my God.
This place is a lot bigger
than it initially looked.
How many square feet is this?
– Four football fields.
– [Dani] So lithography is over there.
Diffusion is over there.
– Diffusion over there.
– …the result of diffusion.
– and deposition was over there?
– Dry and wet etching on the side.
– Etching.
– And planar.
– And planing.
So we’re gonna look at all of that
but there’s no particular
order for these steps
because once a foup comes
in here, you guys can see,
there’re whipping around
all over the place.
There are hundreds of stages.
Each Alder Lake CPU die
might go from lithography to
planing to deposition,
back and forth hundreds of times,
(upbeat music)
Every silicon wafer
comes to diffusion land
and basically what these machines do.
They’re more like a, a furnace
and they will take that top
layer of silicon on the wafer
and they will diffuse it with
some kind of other material.
I asked for some examples,
but other than silicon oxide,
they wouldn’t really tell anything
and in fact, they wouldn’t even tell me
what the first material layer would be
for pure processors that
they’re making here now.
Here we go, we can actually
see the robot arm inside
that would take the silicon
wafers out of the foup
and position them as
needed for the machine.
This is the loading area down here
that we can see through the window
and then on top is the actual furnace
where it reaches 100s of degrees
and then it has gases in there
that help them to achieve
whatever kind of chemical
changes that they’re going for
on top of the wafer.
One thing Intel’s been
very particular about is
don’t touch anything because
it’s more than just, you know,
not pressing the wrong button,
but actually even just
bumping these machines.
When you’re trying to build
something that has structures in
it that are on the side
eyes order of nanometers,
that means that the building
blocks of that thing
are sub-nanometer in some cases.
So you, you actually, you cannot,
you cannot bump one of these
machines while it’s running
and in fact, they only build their fabs
on particularly stable parts of the world
where they don’t have to
worry about seismic activity.
This is cool.
As we’re walking through diffusion,
we actually got a great
opportunity to show you guys
the multi-level structure of the fab.
So what we’re walking on is
only 1 of 4 total layers.
Above us are filters
and the air comes from there down to here.
Then below us is where
they’re gonna have pumps,
chemistry delivery,
you can see these punch-outs
in the floor here.
You can actually see there’s like a foam,
like vent of some sort
going up into the machine
that’s next to us
and then the air flows from top to bottom
so it goes down to that layer,
then it goes down to one more layer
where they have water,
utilities like electricity
as well as exhaust.
So that air goes back up
the side of the building
and recirculates.
In total, Intel expects anywhere from 0
to 1 particle part,
what was the unit of volume?
1 meter cubed and for context,
an operating room could have
tens of thousands of
particles per meter cubed.
So you,
you could conceivably
perform surgery in here,
assuming you were qualified.
I asked about this sign
and apparently it’s just to make sure that
as people are blowing
though this corridor,
they don’t accidentally smoke someone
coming out of the reticle room.
This is one of those secret areas,
even here inside the fab
which is already a secret area
because it contains some of
the most expensive materials
that they need for lithography
it’s also some of the most top secret.
Now under normal circumstances,
every one of these stations
would be occupied by someone.
In fact, the entire factory
runs on 4 shifts a day,
24/7, 364 days a year, only
shutting down for Yom Kippur.
So I didn’t ask because I’m
afraid to know the answer,
but I think it’s probably
costing Intel a fair amount
to have us in here poking around
while they didn’t sponsor
the video or anything.
Definitely shout out to Intel
for how much it’s costing them
for us to make this video.
On that note, here’s something cool.
These tools are maybe not as sophisticated
as some of the other
tools here in the fab,
you got your flathead screwdriver
but the process is what’s fascinating
because taking a machine like this offline
for more than a few minutes
at a time, very, very costly.
So they handle it kind of
like a formula one pit crew.
They’ve got all their tools,
everything’s arranged,
freaking ready to rock.
They go, okay time,
we’re shutting it off, we’re
performing maintenance,
go, go, go, go, go, go, go,
fire it back up.
That’s it.
Don’t worry, I will not hit any buttons.
This is the emo button, okay?
The machine will get
very sad if you press it.
This machine right here is
doing dry etching right now.
So the foups come down
off of the track up there
and then while they’re waiting,
you can see they’re actually sitting out
cause they sit away from the machine
and while they’re being processed,
they come up right next to it here,
and then you can see
there’s a robot arm inside
grabbing wafers, whipping them around.
It just throws it on here
for a span of, I don’t know,
5 or 10 seconds,
boom, it’s dry etched.
It goes back in the foup
and then that whole foup
is gonna head off to
whatever the next step is for
this particular processor.
We don’t know exactly what it’s making,
but everything here is Intel 7 so,
modern CPUs pretty much
or maybe future CPUs for all I know.
Not every drying machine is identical
as you guys can imagine.
For all the different
specialized processes
that a wafer goes through,
there might be different machinery.
So this is another example
of a dry etching machine
where the wafer actually
sits in this chamber in here
and does whatever the heck it’s doing.
Now we’re heading back to
the lithography area again,
which is why the lighting in the fab
has changed back to yellow
and the reason for that
is they use UV light
to expose the wafers.
So if they have white light,
it could easily contain
parts of the spectrum
that could accidentally expose the wafer.
So they have to use these
carefully controlled light sources
that will not cause
any damage to the wafer
as they’re ripping around in the foup
or going in and out of the machines.
Fun fact,
each of these machines
costs on the order of
30$ to $40 million
and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist
to figure out or I should say a,
a chip architect to figure out
that when you put this many
of them packed this tight
into an area of the size
of four football pitches,
that’s gonna cost a pretty penny
and it’s because of those costs
that they actually have this
entire sort of row of cabinets
I guess you could call it
in between the east and
west side of the fab.
This entire thing is full of foups
that are just waiting to be processed
because the second one of
those machines is available,
you want to be loading it up with silicon
so you can make more processors.
Now we’re out of lithography again,
we’re in the east side of the fab
which is also freaking enormous
and the first machine
that we’re encountering
are deposition machines.
So what these do
is they’ll take the wafer
and they’ll apply some
extraordinarily thin layer of something,
say for example, metal,
okay?
Then it comes back into the foup,
back up to the rails and
off to the next step.
Did I ever say, we’re
gonna go see the planers.
– [Dennis] – Yes you did.
– Now depending on the
stage of wafer processing,
cuz remember they you go back and forth
hundreds of times for a single die,
you don’t necessarily want the
straight edges of a dry etch,
you might want this kind of
curved shape of a wet edge.
Now the actual exact shape is
apparently extremely important
and extremely difficult to control
because unlike a dry
etch, there’s actually,
you can actually hear
the sound of the pump.
You hear that right now,
so there’s actually
chemicals pumping inside.
Another key consideration
if you’ve got such expensive
machinery is training.
So one of the things that
Intel wanted to show us
is how they’re using augmented reality
practically right here in the
fab for a variety of purposes.
So one is due to COVID 19.
Obviously some personnel were
not able to be here in person
for an extended period of time.
So remote assist allows
someone who is here in person
to actually have someone else
scribbling on a schematic
or explaining it to them while
it hovers in front of them.
Pretty freaking cool.
It’s also used as a training resource
for maintenance of old machines
so you can kind of learn by doing,
and they’re actually gonna
do a practical demo for us.
Hey, here’s our, here’s
our test guinea pig here
and you got some my
mug, that’s unfortunate.
Oh, that’s awesome.
So it shows you all the tools you need.
So there’s a little instructional
video for how to do it.
Very cool.
Hey, look at me, I’m a fab
equipment maintenance technician.
Unfortunately the windows on
these machines are quite dark
but we did manage to catch one
that is being processed right now
so we’ve got some footage to show guys.
Essentially after the deposition step,
you’re gonna end up with
some inherent unevenness
that needs to be polished off.
Now in the past,
they might have actually submerged
the wafers for polishing,
but now it’s actually done by a brush
that has a slurry on
it that Intel said is,
very proprietary.
They wouldn’t even give me any
hints as to what is in this,
this polishing with liquid
but they did tell me
that the pressure as
well as the motion of it
has to be so precise that they
could take off as little as
a few atoms or molecules at a time.
You could see the way for moving
back and forth on the, like
spinning bottom.
Crazy.
One thing that’s missing is
I don’t see where that tray,
that loads all the wafers in is.
Where the foup is it?
Haha, get it?
Cause it’s a foup.
By the way,
something I didn’t mention before
is that each of the
different types of machines
actually has a number,
but it also has these animals
because Intel found that
especially in a multi-layered
design like fab 28,
in order to make sure that the
maintenance crew down below
is actually, you know,
shutting down the correct
machine for maintenance up above,
it’s much easier to communicate
and much easier to remember,
Oh, we’re working on a giraffe
machine or a ladybug machine.
Apparently most of the staff
that we saw in there though
we’re actually maintenance
staff for the machines
and the actual control center
or brain of the operation
is elsewhere.
So we’re gonna head over there now.
This is the remote
operational center, which is,
you could think of kind of
like the brains of the fab
that we just saw.
So if something goes wrong,
it’s gonna pop up as an
error on someone’s screen
so it’s the job of everyone in this room
to optimize the overall
throughput of the fab.
So instead of having technicians
there on the fab floor,
moving things around
and looking at screens
and turning dials,
everything is done right here to ensure
that they’re pumping as
many chips out as possible
because once you invest
30$ to 40$ million in a machine times,
however many were in there,
(chuckles)
you want them going as
hard as you possibly can,
as often as you possibly can.
(upbeat music)
Every shift,
they have to do two stretching
sessions in order to,
you know, minimize the risk of RSI,
cuz they’re basically sitting
at their computers all day,
every day, right?
(applauds)
But like the friend who
only invited you to dinner
because he wanted to show off his new car,
Intel had a bit of an
agenda for inviting us here
and that is to show off
the enormous investment
that they’re making into fab 38.
So everything that we just
saw is about to be doubled.
This roundabout,
see you later in about two weeks.
That entire construction site out there
is going to be state of the art,
new generation fabrication technology
that will actually be integrated
so tightly with the existing fab
that you could actually
take a wafer from one,
utilize equipment in the other
and then send it back
if you really needed to,
although that’s gonna be quite a distance
for the foups to travel.
To give you some idea
of how enormous this
construction project is,
Intel actually built their
own concrete production
in the corner of the lot over there
which you can see at the very back.
Unreal.
One of the big reasons
Intel is building out fab
capacity so aggressively right now
is a new concept called IDM 2.0
where basically instead of only
building their own products,
they’re going to be fabing products
for third party companies
which I personally
given that we’re sitting
in the middle of the
largest ever global silicon shortage,
I’m pretty excited about.
Now, unfortunately there
are a couple of steps
in the die creation process
that we weren’t able to see today.
The addition of the bumps
that connect the dye to the
package through electro plating,
that doesn’t happen here
and quality control.
QC starts with an end of the line E-test,
which checks the functionality
of fake debugging structures
and transistors
that are specifically meant to be there
to ensure that everything went
correctly in manufacturing.
Then it proceeds to binning.
Which is the process of
sorting the good dies
according to their capabilities.
Obviously the best of the
best will become core I9,
the next best will be core
I7 and so on and so forth.
Other than that 12th
gen core or Alder Lake
is a pretty unique product for Intel
with much of the design and manufacturing
done here in Israel.
Once the wafer’s done,
Intel sends it to one of
their other facilities
for slicing and packaging
and a second validation step called class
where they basically
burn in every single chip
to ensure that no degradation took place
and that the packaging was done properly.
This along with design phase testing
that simulates the effects of CPU aging
is where it Intel’s reputation
for manufacturing quality
comes from.
I mean, think about it,
when you’re troubleshooting
a system that won’t boot
the CPU is the last
thing you’re gonna check
because unless you dropped
it, it probably works.
Packaging by the way,
is gonna be getting a lot more complicated
over the next few years
as multi-die processors
like the upcoming Sapphire
Rapids start rolling out
and it’s expected that
the relatively basic
packaging facilities of yesteryear
are gonna be getting a lot more fab like.
I mean,
a packaging error on a $10,000 server CPU
is a pretty expensive mistake
given that the whole thing
needs to be thrown away at that stage
if something goes wrong.
Maybe that should be
the next tour I request.
Am I right?
Actually, I’m not gonna
push my luck at the moment.
This was a once in a lifetime opportunity
and I’m extremely grateful
to Dani and his team.
Shout out to Karen by
the way for hosting me,
to you guys for coming
and sharing it with me
and of course, to my sponsor.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out one of previous tours.
It’s been a little while, but
they are excellent videos.
