Three months for the whole process, gigantic factories and machines costing tens of millions of dollars: a CPU isn't made by snapping your fingers.
Just over a month ago, we mentioned a very interesting video posted by the Branch Education Youtube channel. Its aim was to clarify how a microprocessor, or CPU for Central Processing Unit, works. In just over 30 minutes, the channel's specialists cover each stage, using analogies that may be a little schematic, but which have the advantage of making the five-stage cycle that characterizes the CPU much easier to understand: Fetch - Decode - Execute - Memory - Writeback. A few weeks later, we followed up with a second video, this time focusing on the CPU's alter ego, the GPU( Graphics Processing Unit).
Today, we return to another remarkable sequence created by the Branch Education channel. Just under 30 minutes in length, this video clearly complements the previous two, enabling us to understand everything there is to know about the manufacture of these two key chips in the semiconductor industry... and even in our society in general. From EUV photolithography to the question of FOUP, this new video from our colleagues is an opportunity to go into the details of the gigantic factories that are set up to - it's a bit of a paradox - produce such small components.
These factories can be the size of eight soccer pitches, and contain multiple machines costing from $3.5 million for the least expensive to over $170 million for the formidable devices designed by Dutch company ASML. These machines are used one after the other for a succession of stages, each more important than the next, in a process that lasts more or less three months: three months during which the material becomes the famous wafer, which is then cut to obtain the dies for our processors, which can finally be packaged, usually in another factory.
