I happened to be looking for something on YouTube recently when I came across this video on Intel's YouTube channel. It's a bit cutesy at the beginning ("Hi, I'm Chip"), but in five minutes it gives a pretty good idea of how chips are manufactured.

One problem all of us face in the semiconductor and EDA industries, and probably many other tech industries, too, is to explain what it is we do to friends and relatives. Analogies only go so far, and it is hard to convey the complexity of a chip. If people have played SimCity then one analogy is that designing a chip is something like designing a city in SimCity with all the water, sewers, electricity, buildings, and so forth. But instead of just being a modest city, on the scale of the entire world. And not just the land, paving over the oceans, too. As the talking microprocessor in the video says, "I'm probably the most complex product manufactured in the world."

Here's Intel's description:

Want to better understand transistors, wafers, photolithography? Not quite sure what to make of mask operations, die sort and prep, and assembly and test? This video will help you better understand these key concepts and their roles in chip manufacturing.

Intel is an IDM, an integrated device manufacturer. This means that they design, manufacture, and market their chips. Most designs today are made using the fabless-foundry model. One company, the fabless semiconductor company, designs the chip and markets it after manufacture. But they subcontract the manufacturing to what is known as a foundry, a semiconductor company that focuses on manufacture, along with the associated R&D. But the foundry doesn't design their own semiconductor products. It is similar to, and named after, the model used for manufacturing metal parts. The foundry makes metal parts for a range of customers, none of whom are generally interested in running their own foundry.

How Chips Are Made

EDA 101

I have a presentation that I've given a few times at Cadence called EDA 101. Almost everyone learns something, but the presentation is intended more for people who are not in engineering. They hear words like "simulation" or "synthesis", and product names like "Virtuoso" or "Xcelium", but have no idea what these are since they don't have a basic knowledge of how chips are designed to slot in these terms.

If you work for Cadence you can watch video replays of this on our intranet, but it is not designed for external consumption. I plan to produce a video of EDA 101 later in the year that I can make public. In the meantime, I'll write up some of the most appropriate content in some Breakfast Bytes blog posts.

Intel Museum

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Intel Museum in a post wittily titled The Intel Museum. Intel was one of the Fairchildren, a company created by some of the people who used to work at Fairchild Semiconductor. When I was putting this post together, I went to the Intel YouTube channel to find the video about fabrication. And there's a new video about the Intel Museum. Interesting statistic: 85,000 people visit the Intel Museum every year. If you live in Silicon Valley you should, too. You can see Intel's original business plan hand-typed by Gordon Moore, the original Busicom calculator for which the first microprocessor was created, the Altair, the first microprocessor-based personal computer, and more.

Here's the video (1m 20s):

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