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Tag: How to Build a Computer

How to Build a Computer 40: Chemical Mechanical Planarization

Internet's Hank

August 8, 2021

If you’re making a modern computer chip you’re going to need to put layer after layer of traces down. You’re also going to need layer after layer of insulator between your metal in order to not short circuit everything. But if you start growing oxides and depositing metals and such and so forth your wafer is going to end up wrinklier than yer grandma’s keister. That’s going to cause problems. Your layers won’t have uniform thicknesses anymore. Particularly the photoresist which means your chances at making a decent pattern degrade. Assuming you don’t end up with fatal defects from underdeveloping at the very least you lose feature size precision. Oh, and you end up with the occasional smug columnist making you visualize yer grandma’s keister. Heh.

Surely You Wouldn’t Be Bringing This Up if You Didn’t Have a Handy Gadget Solution?

Well you’re in luck Mr. Douglas. What you need is a Chemical Mechanical Planaraization rig. Or Chemical Mechanical Polishing. CMP. Whatever. (It makes a difference, but people often use the terms interchangeably.) Now, you could just deposit some borophosphosilicate glass on there and heat it up, expect the glass reflow, cover that topography like the snows o’ winter covering a shallow grave. In the olden days that was good enough; got the job done. These days the devices are smaller, the lines sharper. If you want real flatness, if you need to get down to a fifty angstrom step height over the surface of the entirety of your wafer, you want the real McCoy. CMP; accept no substitutes.

How to Build a Computer 39: Epitaxy II: The Reckoning

Internet's Hank

December 14, 2020

I know y’all have been waiting eagerly with your wafer in the chamber, the temperature pumped down and your native oxide layer stripped off for me to finish this two-parter. Well, wait no longer! Okay, maybe wait some as you have to find a tank of dichlorosilane to hook up so you have something to epitax onto your wafer. Di-what now?

Dichlorosilane! Or Tri- or Tetra; really anything from SiH4 to SiCl4 works, though I’m told industry generally works with SiCl2H2. Alright, you pump in dichlorosilane gas and react it on the wafer and it puts silicon on top of your silicon. Neat, huh? That’s it! Join us fortnight next for —

How to Build a Computer 38: Epitaxy

Internet's Hank

November 21, 2020

Hello and welcome back to How to Build a Computer. If any of y’all are worried about my long absence, well, let that be a lesson to you: The bearded nogoodnik with the dimensional transportalponder does not have your best interests in mind. Sadly, the story is much less interesting than that; I ran out of processes that I either learned about in school or worked with on the job. I’m much less happy regurgitating textbooks than I am imparting actual experience. For instance, I don’t even know if “epitax” is a real verb, but I’m going to use it like such because it’s fun to say.

With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s take a look at the wonderful world of Epitaxy. From the Greek root it looks like we’re talking about a tax atop your other taxes, but however timely and relevant such a word might otherwise be that’s not what we’re working on. What we’re building here is a crystal on top of your other crystal. Recall way back from the start how wafers are sliced out of boules that are composed of one giant crystal. There’s some advantage to remember that that’s not a perfectly flat surface. Here, let me demonstrate:

Getting Myself Phished, a Quick Yakking about Hacking

Internet's Hank

April 30, 2020

Phishing is the email version of pretending to be someone you’re not. The end goal is to talk some dupe into clicking on your link, to either steal their information or otherwise break into their computer. I know a thing or two about what this is and how it works, and yet I clicked on the link last night. Let’s go straight to story mode, shall we?

I see an email in my inbox, from Admin PayPal. Subject line “Your account has been limited. (Code: E8 -s0me-malarky)” I open the email. I’ll screenshot the message for you to see it for yourself.

How to Build a Computer 37: CVD II, This Time It’s Personal

Internet's Hank

September 21, 2019

Last time, if you’ll recall, I discussed the basic idea of a chemical vapor deposition system, and described how you’d use it to deposit silicon onto your wafer. Today we’re following rather directly from that post, where we answer some important questions. Questions like “What if I don’t want to put down silicon? What other things can you offer me?” Well, for starters

SiCl4(g) + 2H2(g) + O2(g) —> SiO2(s) + 4HCl(g) ~900 C

How to Build a Computer 36: Chemical Vapor Deposition

Internet's Hank

September 14, 2019

No matter how much fun you’re having etching silicon, applying and stripping photoresist, or implanting ions, sooner or later you’re going to have to actually put down some lines. Gotta build a circuit eventually. Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) is one of the main ways this gets done. Let’s have a look at what we’re doing, shall we?

If I had known I was going to use this picture at least three times I might have put a little more effort into the sketching.

How to Build a Computer 35: Anisotropic Etching

Internet's Hank

August 18, 2019

Last time we talked about how to make tiny little holes in silicon using harsh acids. Wet etching is fine and all, but sometimes you just can’t make a feature small enough. You’re limited by the aspect ratio. That is, how wide it is versus how tall it is. A post hole has a high aspect ratio because it’s much deeper than it is wide. A strip mine is a pretty low aspect ratio hole. The difficulty with making high aspect ratio holes in your silicon is that your etchant is going to etch down, yes, but it’s also going to etch towards the sides.

Before we get into dry etching there’s one more trick for making an anisotropic (uh, it etches downward quicker than it goes sideways. Literally the word means not-the-same-in-all-directions.) wet etch. What happens if you do your etching with a strong base instead of a strong acid? As it turns out, and for no reason, I’ve managed to determine, a strong base will etch one crystal face preferentially.

How to Build a Computer 34: Etching

Internet's Hank

July 13, 2019

We’re moving back from the series on measurement to the whole process of making computer bits out of silicon. Way back, starting with Computers 7, I started a series on patterning; how you can take an idea and draw it small enough that you can apply that pattern to these really tiny circuits. I went over, step by step, each thing you need to do to create the pattern. I skipped entirely the bit where I tell you what, exactly, you do with one of those patterns when you’ve got them. This is the first of a couple of articles that fit, in manufacturing terms, between Computers 15 (Developing), and 16 (Stripping). You develop your pattern on with photoresist, this is how you make it permanent.

We’ll start with etching. Broadly speaking ‘etching’ covers any process where you start with more material and end up with less material. I mean aside from gambling. Let’s say you’ve got your silicon wafer, you want to etch some of that silicon away. To do this we start by burning your wafer. …Okay, perhaps that’s poor phrasing. Put the flamethrower down and I’ll describe what I mean. To protect your silicon wafer from the damage the etching process would do to it we’re going to want to mask it, with a silicon dioxide layer. Heat your wafer up in the presence of oxygen and this happens:

How to Build a Computer 33: Atomic Force Microscopy!

Internet's Hank

June 22, 2019

Atomic Force Microscopy is a refinement of that long and hallowed scientific tradition: poke it with a stick and see what happens. Picture, if you will, a blind man walking across the street. He taps the ground with his cane, profiling the height of the surface. That tells him where the curbs are; he doesn’t trip because he knows when to step up and step down. Now picture that blind man in a skate park, full of ramps and contours. He could, by painstaking effort, tap his cane up and down the entire area of the skate park and build up a picture in his mind where all the half-pipes lay, even though he can’t see ’em himself. Now picture him in that same skate park, doing kick-flips and grinding like a pro. Because that sounds awesome.

Three square microns of (highly ordered pyrolitic) graphite. A friend of mine measured this as part of a school project we worked on. This is after a metaphorical baseball bat to the head of mathematical smoothing.

How to Build a Computer 32: X-Rays

Internet's Hank

May 27, 2019

I think x-rays have had their dramatic potential shortchanged by the way they’re actually useful. You hear “gamma rays” and your mind is drawn to the Incredible Hulk and how he gained his bright purple shorts. Cosmic Rays? Space madness! But when your mind turns to x-rays you start thinking “dentistry.” Much less exciting.

Right. Computers. Today we’re going to spend one more post on Electron Microscopy, and another way these things are useful. This one is actually pretty straightforward from topics we’ve already covered. I’m sure y’all have been taking notes, and know immediately that I’m referring to Computers 5: Fundamental Chemistry, where I described the process of prodding electrons into giving up photons. I’ll save you the reread, even though jokes about New Jersey never get old. Here are the useful bits:

How to Build a Computer 31: Sputtering

Internet's Hank

May 4, 2019

Today we answer an important question: “How do I coat things in metal; even things that don’t want to be coated in metal?” You want to plate gold onto you Sacajawea dollar, that’s easy enough. You can use electricity to get one metal to stick to another. You want to cover Jill Masterson you use gold paint. But let’s say you’ve got a little plastic doohickey you want to look at under an SEM. Plastic famously refuses to conduct electricity. So how do you defeat the charging problems? (The charging problems that we mentioned last time. You were paying attention, weren’t you?) The answer is you sputter coat it. And this week I’ll be explaining what that means.

Also in the SEM lab; you can tell by the example images they’ve stuck into the window.

How to Build a Computer 30: SEMsational

Internet's Hank

April 22, 2019

This is a continuation of last time’s discussion on Electron Microscopy. In that one, we covered the question of why you’d want one of these and gave a summary of how you’d work one. Take some electrons, throw it at your sample, and watch what bounces off for information. Sounds so simple when we put it that way, right? This week we’re talking about what happens when you actually buckle down to do it in practice.

Taken from Chem lab, when there weren’t any chem techs around to stop me.

Quote of the Day: Computers

April 5, 2019

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’…I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), p. 67

Computers. When designed properly, they do precisely what they are told. They do not interpret, they need to be explicitly instructed on what exactly to do. However, when you get them going, they give you incredible capabilities. During WW2, people would have sacrificed armies to obtain the computing power in your cell phone. Even a simple flip phone has more power than all the computers in existence at the time. Charles Babbage could have revolutionized history, had manufacturing been up to the task — William Gibson’s novel The Difference Engine posits just such a future. (It was the beginning of the Steampunk genre)

How to Build a Computer 29: Electron Microscopy

Internet's Hank

March 18, 2019

For the next couple of posts, we’ll be sauntering through the science of measurement. To put it simply, computer bits are really, really small. So as you wander through the world of building them how do you know you’ve made the thing right? Well, let’s start simple. You can just look at ’em. I could go on a great big tear about optical microscopy which is still an important subject, and relevant. The problem with it is that I just don’t find the subject very interesting. Still, you get some neat images.

This is my fingerprint, photographed on the background of one of them hard drive platters I ripped out of that drive in the video. FBI please ignore.

How to Build a Computer 28: Video Edition!

Internet's Hank

March 3, 2019

Coming to you taped from the Wastes of Wisconsin Winter we present a special video edition of how to build a computer. In this post I take apart a hard drive and look at the bits piece by piece. Thrills, chills, blood and laughter, folks this film has it all! And at a price so low I’m practically giving it away.

How to Build a Computer 26: Spindles and Platters and So Forth

Internet's Hank

February 3, 2019

We’ve discussed what it means to actually store information on a hard disk drive, how you magnetize it and how you pull that information off. Neat stuff, but a bit heavy on the abstract physics. Today we’re going to zoom out a bit and look at the mechanical bits of how hard drives work. Here, let me start you off with a picture. Take a look at these two hard drives (conveniently cracked open for viewing purposes), one I borrowed from the boss man, and the other I picked up off the “Free Stuff” shelf when they moved the engineering department. Tell me which you think stores more data:

None of the above. Neither of is ever going to run again. Look at that dust!

How to Build a Computer 25: The Magnetoresistive Effect

Internet's Hank

January 21, 2019

Our story starts with Lord Kelvin, one of the great old school physicists. You can read about his career from anonymous’s old Saturday Night Science. Actually, at the point he enters this story I don’t think Kelvin had made lord yet; he was just some bloke named Thompson. This Thompson fellow was playing around with magnets and electricity and that sort of thing. What he discovered is that you can change the resistance of a wire with a magnetic field. And furthermore that that change in resistance depends on the angle between the wire and the magnetic field.

Let’s take that a little more slowly. Change in resistance when you’re in a magnetic field? Okay, I can buy that; there’s all this nonsense about wires and magnets and whatnot that I’ve been blathering about up until this point. Angle? The resistance in your wire will vary a great deal whether it’s parallel or antiparallel to the magnetic field on your disk. (Antiparallel means parallel, but facing the other direction. The northbound lane on a highway is antiparallel to the southbound lane.) If your wire is running current right-to-left and your magnetic field is pointed left-to-right then your wire’s resistance is at it’s highest because of your antiparallel configuration.

How to Automate a Job Out of Existence

Internet's Hank

January 15, 2019

This is an elaboration of a comment I made in @indymb ‘s post “Is there any point in writing to a Congressperson?” and I’m indebted to him and @Misthiocracy (who has experience working for a Canadian Member of Parliament, I understand) for the details on how all this works. Briefly, we’ll look at a simple task done every day in the houses of government and at how we’d train a computer to do it better.

Briefly, as you may have expected, the letter to your Senator isn’t so much read as processed for the minimum amount of information and interaction required. I’ll quote the meat of his description of the process and then describe how I’d go about automating it. You’re encouraged to go back and read his post (and it should go without saying on Ricochet but the comments too).

How to Build a Computer 24: Reading and Writing

Internet's Hank

January 6, 2019

Last time we discussed electricity, magnetism, and how you can generate a magnetic field with an electric current. You know what? Let’s jump straight to the kielbasa:

You could start with a salad, but why bother?

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