A Chip Is Born: Inside a State-of-the-Art Clean Room

From: http://www.wired.com/

By Dylan F. Tweney and Jonathan Snyder

If you wish to compose an e-mail, index a database of web pages, stream a kitten video in 720p or render an explosion at 60 frames per second, you must first build a computer.

And to build a computer, you must first design and fabricate the tiny processors that rapidly churn through the millions of discrete computational steps behind every one of those digital actions, taking a new step approximately 3 billion times per second.

To do all this, you are probably going to need chip-manufacturing machines from Applied Materials, one of the main suppliers of such equipment to the semiconductor industry.

Applied's machines subject silicon wafers (such as the Intel wafer shown below) to incredibly intense vacuums, caustic chemical baths, high-energy plasmas, intense ultraviolet light, and more, taking the wafers through the hundreds of discrete manufacturing steps required to turn them into CPUs, memory chips and graphics processors.

Because those processes aren't exactly friendly to humans, much of this work happens inside sealed chambers where robot arms move the wafers from one processing station to another. The machines themselves are housed within clean rooms whose scrubbed air (and bunny-suited employees) keep the risk of aerial contamination low: A single dust particle from your hair is all it takes to ruin a CPU that might sell for $500, so companies are eager to minimize how often that happens.

Wired/com recently toured Applied Materials' Maydan Technology Center, a state-of-the-art clean room in Santa Clara, California, where Applied develops and tests its machines.

Its 39,000 square feet of ultraclean workspace equals about 81 yards of a football field, and is divided into three huge "ballrooms," each of which is crammed full of Applied's multimillion-dollar machines, alongside pipes, tubes, spare parts, tanks of caustic chemicals, Craftsman tool chests and huge racks of silicon wafers. To get inside, you must suit up in a bunny suit, with a face mask and goggles, two pairs of gloves, and shoe-covering footies. We couldn't even take a reporter's notebook inside: Instead, Applied's staff gave us a shrink-wrapped, specially sanitized clean-room notebook and clean-room pen to use.

It's not a manufacturing facility. Instead, this clean room simulates the fabs where Applied's machines will be used, enabling the company (and its customers) to test out new techniques and processes before putting them on the production line. As such, it provides a rare glimpse inside the world of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing.

Top photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Bottom photo: Intel

Old PC Holding You Back?

posted by Ken Kaplan

Laptops are helping more people do more of what they love in more places around the world.

That’s what we learned while collecting stories and footage from the UC Berkeley campus, Malaysia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We mixed those stories with data collected by Intel computer performance engineers.

In this video:

• HD playing on a new vs. a three-year older laptop
• Editing high quality video at home or even the beach
• Recording and mixing music at home, a club or with other DJ live over the Internet
• A college field hockey coach helping students become well rounded adults with the help of her laptop and digital video camera

Today, high quality HD video and television shows are being served up to computers from ever more Internet sites like Hulu, Disney, Fancast, TV.com, and the networks ABC, CBS and NBC. Not only are they all offering Internet HD video, many people (myself included and each of our Intel Insiders) are creating HD videos and uploading them to various video sites.

If you go to NASA’s site be prepared for an HD video experience. And it is not limited to watching. New laptops and desktops are empowering people to do things with rich media they could never do before. But if you got your PC three years ago, that would mean it was built in 2005, before the onslaught of online HD video and the rise of sites like YouTube and Facebook

Intel engineers put older and new computers to the test, and here’s what we learned:

• Compared to most Intel-powered laptops from 2005, a newer laptop from 2009 powered by an Intel Core processor can help you do more things, faster
• The 2009 laptop can multitask better and perform up to two times better,
• play HD internet TV shows, and can convert photos into videos as much as three-times faster than the 2006 laptop

Here is a place to learn about the latest Intel consumer technologies being used by PC makers around the world. If you’re interested in the sources for the old vs. new computer comparisons, check out the Intel performance site.

My Anecdotal Home Tests

At home, I have one desktop that is four years old. It helped my wife get through her PH.D program at UC Berkeley. But for the past few months, she feared that the computer was on its last leg, about to croak. I saw her trying to surf and watch videos on FanCast, the Comcast landing page. It worked, but it was painful watching her move from one video to another and then move to searching on Google, even when connected to the fastest home service Comcast offers.

I checked, and my two year laptop doesn’t choke like our old desktop. One other proof point for me is that my one-year-old MacBook is way better at editing video, photos and multitasking than my two year-old laptop.

I’ve been buying computers since 1986, and I’ve always tried buying one that will last at least three or four years. My first computers seemed to last four or five year, especially with a little memory upgrade. It seems now computers are getting much better much faster, so around the third year, I notice my patience wearing thin as computer begins bogging down when I’m working several browser tabs and other applications running at the same time.

I have a few four year old laptops I keep around, but they’re my clunkers for the kids to play with — they’re slower and just not as trusted as my newer laptops.

On the other end, I actually look forward to turning on my 2008 MacBook and quickly diving into my video editing and social media sharing.

I have heard that something like 2 out of every 5 or 6 consumer computers being used by consumers today are three years old or older — “over the hill” and possibly holding back their owners from fully enjoying the media-rich experience that today’s Internet offers.

Maybe some of these older PC are considered collector items by their owners. Or they’re waiting for the right time to buy that right model with specific mix of technologies inside and out.

Intel's 8-core CPUs will have 2.3 billion transistors

By Wolfgang Gruener

San Francisco (CA) – Intel celebrates its annual research show-off at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) with a look at upcoming Nehalem processors. The company is planning a “family” of processors with up to eight cores that will remain in the current dual- to quad-core power envelope. We have known for a while that Intel’s Nehalem processors will be available with up to eight cores and multithreading technology to enable them to run up to 16 threads in parallel. This week at ISSCC 2009, Intel will be providing more detailed information about the Nehalem processor lineup. According to the conference program, 45 nm Nehalem processors are on the way for mobile, desktop and server applications. Besides the fact that these processors will have up to eight cores, it is interesting to note that despite the core count Intel will be able to maintain the power envelope of its current Core 2 processors. On the mobile side, some CPUs will be rated at a thermal design power (TDP) of less than 10 watts, while high-end versions will be listed with a 130 watt TDP. Intel will discuss in more detail a 45 nm 8-core “Enterprise” Xeon processor, which carries 2.3 billion transistors. The company said that it uses core cache shut-off techniques to minimize leakage, but a power consumption of 130 watts in such a scenario is certainly impressive nevertheless. Four years ago, we had 90 nm single-core processors that were scratching at the 130 watt mark and we remember that the firm’s first dual-core processor, the Pentium D 800-series with Smithfield core, was also rated at a TDP of 130 watts. Other news coming from Intel include the description of a monolithic 45 nm 6-core Xeon processor with 1.9 billion transistors, 9 MB L2 and 16 MB L3 cache, which Intel claims is able to exceed a 1 million transactions per minute TPCC in a 8-socket configuration. Also, Intel will highlight a 65 nm quad-core Itanium processor equipped with dynamic frequency switching, which the company says enables a frequency-power optimization without stopping the clock. Surprisingly, there is no news on Intel’s Terascale chip, no new information on clock speed, Teraflops or power consumption. However, a small presentation provides some new insight in the company’s progress with its 32 nm progress. The company claims it has developed a 291 Mb 4.0 GHz SRAM chip in 32 nm high-k metal gate CMOS with integrated power management. The chip is built with 0.171 μm2 6T cells. According to the company, 128 kb subarrays consume only 5 milliwatts of leakage power at 1 volt. Intel showed at similar at the International Electron Devices meeting (IEDM) last December; however, back in December, the 1.9 billion transistor chip ran at only 3.8 GHz. 32 nm shrinks of Nehalem processors are expected to debut in Q4 of this year. It may be interesting to note that 2.3 billion transistor 8-core CPUs have 80,000 times more transistors than the Intel's original 16-bit 8086 CPU first released on 10,000 nm processes just 31 years ago, and one million times more transistors than Intel's original 4-bit 4004 CPU in 1971. UPDATED: February 10, 2009 - 10:06am CST Sandia National Laboratories recently conducted simulations on the benefits and pitfalls of multi-cores. Their simulations show that moving from 2 cores to 4 cores shows a big increase in performance. However, moving from 4 cores to 8 cores barely shows any increase. And moving from 8 cores to 16 cores actually shows a decrease, down almost to the point of a 2-core system in terms of overall compute abilities. While these limitations were imposed primarily due to memory bandwidth limitations, we must realize that this 8-core behemoth (16-virtual core) machine will suffer from the same types of memory limitations on certain workloads. The only applications to see big benefits from 8-core implementations are those where high compute and low bandwidth are needed, and these are fairly rare. In such a case, it would be better to have several individual dual- or quad-core CPUs each connected to their own physical memory along with NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) logic employed in the operating system.