Chapter 1112 A Business Built on a Pile of Sand

San Zhan and Tong Xiaoyun work together on production. …all the friends were very interested, and when they saw Zhou Zhou, they were shocked to go and visit.

In fact, there is nothing interesting to see. But since you want to see it, then go there. "Fan Wubing couldn't stand their entanglement, so he agreed.

Of course, going to see the manufacturing process of Gang is different from going to see Chinese cabbage grown. Fan Wubing informed the factory in advance and asked them to arrange a convenient time.

After staying with Wang Rongchang for two days, Fan Wubing took Cuiqi and Tong Xiaoyun to Fan's chip manufacturing base to visit Bi's manufacturing process.

Fan's chip manufacturing base, with a total investment of more than one billion US dollars, took more than two years to build by 5,000 workers. A total of 30,000 tons of steel and almost 100,000 cubic meters of concrete were used during this period. More than one million meters of cables and two hundred thousand meters of pipelines have been laid.

This manufacturing base covers a total area of ​​approximately 200,000 square meters, equivalent to nearly 30 standard football fields, including a first-class clean room area of ​​40,000 square meters. In this large clean room, no more than one particle of dust less than 0.5 microns is allowed per cubic foot of space, making it a hundred times cleaner than a hospital operating room.

Maintaining a dust-free environment is costly, but not all workshops require such a dust-free environment. Interestingly, the ground is not the hard floor we usually know, but a mesh-like design designed by Cairan, but it is very solid and aims to maintain air circulation. room air. It needs to be completely replaced every four minutes.

After going through very strict and tedious dust removal and other procedures, Fan Wubing, Cuiqi, and Tong Xiaoyun were accompanied by factory engineers. Entering one of the dust-free workshops, the staff here must wear dust-proof clothing to prevent the wafers from being contaminated.

When they looked at it from a distance. I found a technician in the distance walking around holding a kind of box in his arms. According to the engineer, this kind of box is ordinary and contains wafers. What those technicians have to do is to install this device in a machine or processing tool.

Based on cost considerations, only the Yao entrance is in a dust-free room, while the other parts are in a dust-free level below.

At the engineer's reminder, Zhang Qi and the others paid special attention to the floor of the "workshop" just mentioned, and also noticed the machines that process those wafers. That is, the one that processed Hong held by the technician just now.

The number of clean rooms and machines in the entire factory is very considerable, because the process of manufacturing a rigid wafer is very complex.

A mouth "just requires twenty-six photolithography mask processes. Each process requires many processing steps, plus doping and metal plating, etc., and the last concave. There are hundreds of manufacturing processes.

UV irradiation is required in many workshops. This is essential, but white light is often used in cleanrooms. The dust-free workshop that Fan Wubing and the others just visited uses orange light, which is different from other dust-free workshops. According to the engineer, this is because this is the preliminary process of wafer processing. The reason is that a certain layer of steel is very sensitive to white light.

The staff cannot touch the wafers directly, but put them in black square boxes called... each box can hold twenty-five wafers. This uses aluminum material as the metal layer, and the color is black.

When the staff puts them into the processing machine, the machine will extract the twenty-five wafers one by one. After processing, put it back into the center.

It is automatically transported from one clean room to another according to a predetermined trajectory.

There is an automatic track on the ceiling, and that track is used for transmission.

Under certain conditions, "it is directly transported to the corresponding machine without manual intervention. There is a screen on each machine, and technicians observe the current working status of the machine and what kind of wafers are processed. to the extend.

Here, the final product is not the final product used by computer users. The wafer contains many chips. These wafers are sent to other assembly and test factories, where the wafers will be cut and individual chips will be processed. The chips are detached from above, tested, labeled and shipped. Finally it reached the hands of computer users.

When seeing the wafer rod, Tong Xiaoyun asked a very strange question, "Why should it be made round instead of square? During cutting, the round corners will be wasted, right?"

The engineer next to him explained immediately. "Because when silicon is purified, the raw material silicon will be melted and put into a huge quartz furnace. At this time, a seed crystal is put into the furnace so that the brick crystals grow around the seed crystal until a few-dimensional Nearly perfect single crystal silicon. According to the laws of physics, the final product is a cylinder, which cannot be square. If the cylinder is sliced, it will become a circle. You cannot have any shape you want. ”

After hearing this, Tong Xiaoyun nodded repeatedly, and Fan Wubing smiled and said, "Actually, I don't know much about it, but I'm embarrassed to ask."

The so-called wafer cutting means using a machine to cut a silicon wafer of predetermined specifications from a single crystal silicon rod. And divide it into multiple small areas, each area will become a rigid core.

The next step is photocopying, which is to apply a photoresist on the silicon oxide layer obtained after heat treatment, and ultraviolet rays irradiate the silicon substrate through a template printed with a complex circuit structure pattern. The photoresist is dissolved where the ultraviolet rays are irradiated.

The next step is etching, using a solvent to remove the photoresist irradiated by ultraviolet rays, and then using chemical treatment to etch away the silicon oxide layer that is not covered by the photoresist, and then remove all the photoresist. A silicon substrate with grooves is obtained.

The next step is layering, and silicon oxide is grown again to process a new layer of circuits. Then a layer of polycrystalline silicon is deposited, photoresist is applied, and the photocopying and etching processes are repeated to obtain a groove structure containing polycrystalline bricks and silicon oxide.

Then there is ion implantation. Through ion bombardment, the exposed silicon substrate is locally doped. Thereby changing the conductive state of these areas to form a gate circuit. The next step is to repeat the above process continuously. A complete concave. The core contains about twenty layers, with windows left between the layers and filled with metal to maintain the connection between the circuits of each layer. After the final test, the silicon wafer is cut into individual silicon cores and packaged, and a silicon chip is manufactured.

The final step is packaging, which refers to the installation of a semiconductor integrated circuit shell, which not only plays the role of placing, fixing, sealing, protecting the chip and improving its performance.

The chip packaging technology has gone through several generations, and the technical indicators are more advanced than the previous generation, including the ratio of chip area to packaging area is getting closer to one-to-one, and the frequency of use is getting higher and higher. The temperature resistance is getting better and better. The number of pins is increased. The pin spacing is reduced, the weight is reduced, the reliability is greatly improved, and it is more convenient to use, etc.

"At present, most silicon chips use a flip core packaging form. That is to say, the silicon core we usually see is actually the bottom of the silicon chip. It is flipped and packaged on the ceramic circuit substrate. The advantage of this is that the core can be directly in contact with the heat sink.

This technology is also used in most silicon chips today. The other side of the silicon core, that is, the side covered under the ceramic circuit substrate, must be connected to the external circuit. The engineer introduced to the three people. "Nowadays, there are tens of millions of transistors in the silicon chip, and they must be connected to the external circuit. The connection method is to solder a wire to each transistor and connect it to the external circuit. For example, the number of bow wires we manufactured is 5,000, and the number of 64-bit processors used in servers is 7,500.

Everyone was amazed at what they heard. In fact, to place so many solder joints on such a small chip, these solder joints must be designed very carefully.

Since all calculations must be performed on a very small chip, the core of the chip will emit a lot of heat. The temperature inside the core can reach hundreds of degrees, and the surface temperature will also be dozens of degrees. Once the temperature is too high. It will cause the chip to operate abnormally or even burn. Therefore, many computer books or magazines often emphasize the importance of heat dissipation for the chip.

"How much does the cost of the chip cost?" Zhang Qi asked Fan Wubing. Fan Wubing was also scratching his head after hearing this.

It's not that I'm afraid that everyone will be jealous after I say it. It's because the cost of manufacturing the chip is indeed complicated to calculate, and it's not something that can be explained in one sentence.

The first price factor is the salary and benefits of the design team. This is a huge investment. After all, if you want to design and manufacture the chip. It is necessary to have a very strong and technically advanced design team. Without this as a foundation, it is obviously impossible to accomplish great things.

The second is the cost of wafer manufacturing. Generally speaking, the larger the diameter of the wafer, the more steel cores can be cut out, so the cost of one-time manufacturing will be reduced, the profit will be increased, and the more semi-finished products can be made under the same power consumption, which obviously means a reduction in cost.

With the current eight-inch wafer, a wafer can only cut more than 100 cores. If it is cut with a twelve-inch wafer, at least 280 pieces can be cut out.

Of course, if the photolithography technology is improved and the accuracy is continuously improved, the volume of the steel core can be reduced, so that more can be cut out per unit area.

The price of a twelve-inch wafer is about 7,000 to 8,000 US dollars. According to the latest technology of Fan Investment Group, the technology that has been successfully tested can cut more than 600 cores on a twelve-inch wafer. In this case, the cost will be reduced a lot. In addition to other expenses, it is expected that the cost of a single piece will drop to less than 300 yuan. And this is Fan's latest and most powerful steel core technology.

"In fact, the profit of processors is not very high, because the cost is too high. The investment of a factory is several billion dollars, plus labor, taxes and operating expenses. Generally, a profit of about 20% is good. If the management is not good, it is possible to lose money." Fan Wubing said with some emotion.

In fact, there is one thing that Fan Wubing did not say, that is, the price of a 12-inch wafer is 7,000 to 8,000 US dollars, which is the price in the international market. In fact, Fan's cost is much lower than this price. At the same time, Fan's latest research technology is further reducing the size of the steel core. It is estimated that once it is successful, more than 2,000 steel cores can be cut from a 12-inch wafer. In that case, the cost reduction will be very significant.

Of course, since these things have not been done yet, there is no need to deliberately show off. After all, the outside world still believes that Fan Investment Group's wafer factory can only process eight-inch wafers. In fact, Fan already has the technical reserves to manufacture twelve-inch wafer production lines, and is already building production lines.

According to the latest goals of Fan's R&D team, they have already challenged the eighteen-inch wafer manufacturing technology.

From this point of view, Fan Wubing said that his company's profit is not high, only 20%. It is not a lie, because most of the current profits have been invested in technology research and development and production line construction by Fan Wubing.

. I always heard people say that just a pile of sand is made. The cost is basically zero. Today, I visited here and found out that it is such a complicated manufacturing process. Tong Xiaoyun said with some emotion.

"I have heard this kind of words before. Fan Wubing nodded and said, "The cost of just a pile of sand, the cost of software is a CD. If most people in this country hold this idea. Then it is easy to understand why the creative industry is withering. "

Not to mention that Microsoft sells a very empty thing for thousands of dollars. When Siyang was born, thousands of senior programmers squatted there and wrote for three years. Where did they get their salary? What did these people eat? After they came out, users didn't buy it. Who would bear the risk?

Similarly, they turned sand into steel. How much did they pay? Whether it was deleted or old, they would sign a life and death agreement with each engineer and support them for life. Where did the money come from? This does not include the cost and investment of building a factory, equipment, sales operations, etc.

. Some people simply cannot see the power of high technology. If everything is so simple, how could there be such a thing as the Forbes Super Rich List? Although Ao is a business built on a pile of sand, not everyone can do it. If you don't respect knowledge, you will never get ahead. Fan Wubing shook his head and said.

"Then how do you explain the existence of the coal boss?" Zhang Qi asked back immediately.

"This.   Uh    Fan Wubing was immediately asked.