I haven't posted here in forever and everytime I come into my own blog I can't think of anything to say. Someone ask me an off the wall question so it gives me something to post about.
Snorting the noodle of course, cuz I'd be laughing so hard while trying it that it would never work out. That and I couldn't imagine eating a live frog, I don't even eat seafood that's cooked... Much less something out of water that's still alive.
What do you do anyways, I know it's something to do with co-processors but do you do the manufacturing or do you do the engineering of the chips themselves? I know like the big picture stuff when it comes to chips and what I learned in college but it seems like it's very detail oriented work to take to completion.
What do you do anyways, I know it's something to do with co-processors but do you do the manufacturing or do you do the engineering of the chips themselves? I know like the big picture stuff when it comes to chips and what I learned in college but it seems like it's very detail oriented work to take to completion.
I am part of the manufacturing process. I work in the process development fab where all the new stuff is started, engineered to be better, and then solidified into a full process that we send to other fabs in different parts of the world... Mainly fabs in Arizona, Ireland, New Mexico, Israel, and soon to be China.
My part of the process is called Lithography, or in some places Photolithography. I never see the finished chips themselves, I work with Silicon wafers that go through different parts of the process many many times where we set up different layers of transistors using chemicals, light, heat, and lasers. In my fab/factory we use 300mm wafers, they are the most recent size that's come available, the old fab I worked at when I lived in AZ was a 200mm fab so the wafers were 8 inch wafers instead of 12 inch wafers like I use now.
In my immediate area, what I actually do as a part of the process is... Wafers come in boxes of 25 wafers... these boxes are called Foups. A foup contains wafers of a certain product, which I can't name cuz it's super top secret etc... but we run about 5 different products at a given time... these are different types of chips like, chipsets, server chips, desktop chips, mobile chips...etc. These wafers can have up to 500 chips on a single wafer in some processes... so you can imagine that some of these wafers full of cutting edge chips can be worth a million dollars or more each because of all the R&D that's went into them at the point where i have them running on one of my different equipment sets. So, when the foup gets to my area it goes onto different tools that spin them really fast while dropping a chemical we call resist on them... after getting coated with the resist we send them into a scanner... which actually uses a really special piece of super pure quartz called a reticle (these can easily cost up to $250K a piece depending on what we use them for), we pretty much use a light and take a picture of the reticle which gets transfered onto the wafer a few hundred times... the scanner is also called a stepper because it steps and snaps a pic of the reticle a few hundred times on each wafer. So, after a whole bunch of these patterns are taken on the scanner we send them back into the track to "develop" the patter we just made the "picture" of. So, my main tool in my area Spins, Exposes, and Develops... We call it SED for short when talking about what part of the process I do. After that we send the Foup full of wafers to our metrology tools, which visually inspect, test critical dimensions of the pattern we just put down on the wafers using a laser and microscope, and then make sure everything's aligned correctly for each spot on the wafer using a few other tools/equipment. We use a lot of automation where I'm at now so when a foup gets done at my area it goes to another area to process there. I know absolutely everything about my part of the process and a few other parts of the making of a silicon wafer but these days they actually keep us from knowing more than we need to know because of the amount of secret **** that goes on in different areas. It's kinda funny sometimes when someone will say something in a meeting and then stop to think if they're allowed to talk about such things in front of others...lol So, that's what my area does, as far as my job... i'm the Area Coordinator so I make others aware of what needs to be done, who should be taking care of it, how to do it, talking to the big bad bossman, and just plain keeping things running smoothly. I process the wip on our tools/equipment and if the tools break or aren't running correctly I'll use my magical powers to fix them... or just fix them using my supreme intelligence etc. I've become much more operations minded since working here in Oregon than when I was in Arizona where I worked on a lot more tools from an equipment point of view. I'm more in control of processing the wafers than fixing the tools is a way of looking at it.
A Foup of wafers usually takes about 4-6 weeks to get through the entire process if it doesn't run into any snags along the way so I see the same wafers coming into my area quite a bit. They go through a bunch of steps at one layer, and then come back at another layer, etc... There's much more to my job but it's not all relevant so I won't bore you with everything else much like I've probably already done here.
Very cool. So you're going to be in China huh? Beijing is my hometown actually, I'm going back for the Olympics next year. Going to be kinda of awesome.
Very cool. So you're going to be in China huh? Beijing is my hometown actually, I'm going back for the Olympics next year. Going to be kinda of awesome.
Really Really want to go to china... at this point the fab's completion date was pushed out a bit so that time is getting pushed out even further. I still need to get the job there to be able to go though. *keeps fingers crossed*
