From sand to processor, or how a CPU is made | Hacker News Reader

From sand to processor, or how a CPU is made

newsroom.intel.com

206 pointsekleop23 comments

As an FYI, parts of this article have been taken without any attribution from:

http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/chipmaking/Making_o...

http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/chipmaking/pdfs/Sand...

An example being the sentence "Sand, especially quartz, has high percentages of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO2) and is the base ingredient for semiconductor manufacturing." which seems to have been copied almost word for word.

Other parts of the article appear to have been simply rewritten from other - more reputable/original - sources too.

So to sum up, this source shouldn't be upvoted, IMO.

Also as an FYI, I love how Google rank this on page 1 for [How a CPU is made]... (indeed, above the original sources)

Just after the video, the two links you provided are mentioned.

Maybe other sources are more reputable/original, but this article sums them up nicely and in an enjoyable read, which those PDFs are not (from image quality to layout). Form indeed matters.

Form matters, but so does plagiarism. It's one thing to paraphrase and present information from another source in an easier to read manner; it's another to lift entire phrases word for word without attribution. As others have pointed out, the attribution was only added after the complaint here on HN, and only addressed those particular phrases, it did not list any other sources that may have been used.

Those links appear at the bottom of the page. So unless the author added them just now after seeing your comment... I'm glad plagiarism by itself is not a crime, there are some real witch hunters out there. (You can find a lot of them by looking up Einstein's history.) If I were Google I'd probably favor an HTML page over a PDF too when the content is more or less the same.

He/She (there's no author name) has added them after seeing this comment - I had the tab open for an hour now and there's no attribution there: http://d.pr/6mlz (in case you're wondering about the bizarre colorful thing, it's YouTube! It's blocked in Iran and instead of the video, they display garbage links to government websites)

The links were added recently :)

And it's not really witch hunting - I'm merely pointing out that it's bad form for someone to plagiarise and not attribute the source.

Still not a fan of word-for-word copying, but at least links have been added :)

You can avoid the blogspam and get the content directly from Intel here[1] since it appears every bit of this content was just stolen directly from Intel.

[1] http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-2476

I'd love to know where that sand comes from. A professor in college once told us that not just any sand works for this process, and many wars have been fueled by the need to secure sources of that particular sand in Africa. Couldn't find any references, though...

I know of one place in Australia they tried to mine, but it was blocked on grounds that it was a part of a UNESCO site, the Great Barrier Reef; Whitehaven beach. Can't remember where I read this, it was 10+ years ago. The beach is 98% silica.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehaven_beach

That was the problem, regular sand doesn't contain as much silica as is required for the process. Special sand is required.

Isn't it funny we can't find anything about where that sand comes from?

Er, are you sure you're not thinking of Coltan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan

Yes, I'm sure. While looking up references for my previous post, I read about that. Coltan is another matter entirely, although it shares that particular characteristic of being the reason for much spilled blood.

There is a lot of interesting tech that goes into IC manufacturing, part of EE school was going through the design of a simple IC all the way to manufacturing which involved visiting National Semiconductor and having them fab it.

One of the things I found most interesting is that large sections of the manufacturing sections of the building sit on isolated vibration controlled platforms and there are 'Earthquake" sensors all over the place that can shutdown the plant if too much movement is detected. You can imagine that any vibration causes issues at such small scales. Some of the control platforms/benches are active, meaning they sense any vibration and counteract it using various kinds of actuators.

There are also a lot of really nasty chemicals that go into this. When they say 'Etch' they really mean 'melt it away with a really strong acid'. The materials used for donor doping, usually phosphorous or arsenic are really quite toxic chemicals not helped by the fact that these are often used in gaseous form for implantation and are colorless/oderless. The acceptor dopants are at least pretty harmless most of the time (gallium or boron). Many types of photoresist can also be really dangerous from a safety standpoint. Its pretty impressive that semiconductor plants operate as safely as do, choked up primarily to heavy automation.

Fascinating read. The end bit with the "binning" reminds me of WOW when you would sometimes proc and get a pristine cut in Jewel Crafting.

How can someone down vote this comment? Too many trolls in HN lately...

I knew it would happen anyway :) Probably the only comment I've made on HN where I knew beforehand that mentioning WOW would instantly attract the down-vote hammer. (I don't even play it any more, but knew if I mentioned that tidbit of information as well, I would get downvoted by people who don't play WOW, and people who play WOW now. ha).

Comments that don't add anything (extra information, or point out a problem with the article) tend to get voted down. "I liked this" is not considered a valid comment on HN.

very educational. i knew where Si came from but never really knew how circuitry was created. i'd love to see the machinery behind the actual design/production of chips. superb submit

AMD has a video on the topic. It's beautiful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GQmtITMdas

How Its Made touched on it too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg-mvrG-K-E&feature=relat...

these AMD videos are even better, thanks for pointing these out.

Microchip runs a Masters Conference every year at the end of August. During the week long event they do daily tours of their Phoenix FAB. I think with a bit of determined pleading, one could get a tour other times of the year too.

All I could think about while reading this was minecraft...

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