From never-sleeping cities to remote villages, a technology is changing the way we live and work.
From smartphones in your pockets to the huge data centers that “power” the Internet, from electric scooters to supersonic aircraft, from pacemakers to weather-forecast inglises , inside every device, invisible or little known, this tiny technology makes it possible, it’s called semiconductors.
Semiconductor devices are an essential part of modern computing. A semiconductor device called a transistor is a miniature electronic switch that runs calculations inside a computer.
American scientists built the first silicon transistor in 1947. Prior to this, computer theory was done by a vacuum tube, which was large and slow. Until later, silicon changed everything.
Silicon opens the door to a new level of semiconductor materials, making a large number of semiconductor components smaller and smaller, and this change occurs year by year, and semiconductor components become smaller and smaller, as they become more and more intelligent.
John Neuffer, chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said: “The miniaturization of these transistors allows us to do things that previous generations could not have imagined. “Because we can install large computing devices on microchips. ”
The pace of innovation is unprecedented. The chip began to be miniaturized at a steady rate, as if the technology were following some kind of law.
About 50 years ago, Gordon Moore, co-founder of chip giant Intel, first proposed Moore’s law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years.
Until recent years, Moore’s Law had been proven right. Only now, when the size of the transistor is reduced to the physical limit, the pace of chip miniaturization begins to slow down, and Moore’s law is in effective.
Early transistors were visible to the naked eye, but now a small chip can hold billions of transistors. Most importantly, this exponential improvement in semiconductor manufacturing has fueled the digital revolution.
But silicon, as a central element of the revolution, is surprisingly “modest” and is too widely distributed. Silicon is one of the most common substances on Earth and is found in 90% of the minerals that make up the earth’s crust. A technology around the world is made from one of the most common substances on Earth.
Silicon has powered the $500bn (?410bn) chip industry, which in turn has powered the global technology economy, worth about $3bn.
The semiconductor business has also become one of the most closely linked in history, with raw materials mainly from Japan and Mexico, while chips from the United States and China are shipped around the world and eventually installed in electronic devices to people around the world.
“Silicon may spread worldwide two or three times, from raw materials to end-use, ” says Nave. But this vast global network can trace its origins back to a few very specific places, including the United States, Germany, South Korea and Japan, which are the world’s top four exporters of silicon wafers.
High-end electronics require high-quality raw materials. The purest silicon was later found in quartz rock, with one of the purest quartz stones in the world at a quarry near Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
“It’s a bit of a surprise to me to think that Spruce Pine quartz can be found in almost every cell phone and computer chip,” said Rolf Pippert, mining manager at Quartz. ”
The rocks around spruce pine are very unique. High in silica, a silicon-containing compound with low contaminants, has been mined for centuries for gemstones and mica (a silicate used in paints). However, the quartz that was unearthed was discarded. It was not until the rise of the semiconductor industry in the 1980s that quartz became a platinum-precious substance.
It now sells for $10,000 (8,250 pounds) a tonne, making it $300m a year for the Spruce Pine mine, which is the main business. The rock extracted from the ground with machines and explosives is placed in a crusher, which spews quartz gravel. It is then sent to the processing plant, where the quartz is ground into fine sand. Add water and chemicals to separate silicon from other minerals. The silicon is finally ground, then bagged and delivered to the refinery in powder form.
The world produces billions of chips a year, but only about 30,000 tons of silicon are mined each year. This is less than the amount of construction sand produced in the United States every hour. “In the Spruce Pines area, the reserves are very large,” Piper said. “We now have decades of chip making materials. And the industry could change before we run out of quartz. “It’s a
Grind the silicone powder into fine details, melt the fine endins in a furnace at 1400 degrees C and make cylindrical ingots, then cut them into thin slices, resulting in a product called wafers, which are cut like chopped cucumbers. Eventually, dozens of rectangular circuits are engraved on each wafer in the plant’s assembly line, such as the fab operated by Global Foundries in New York State. From the fab, the chip began its journey into Earth.
“We have the presses for any electronic device that all the companies want to build,” says Chris Belfi, a cleanroom engineer at Global Foundries.
The chip is so small that even fine matters such as dust or hair can damage its complex circuits.
To avoid contaminating microelectronics, the extensive wafer factory floor must be sterile. The six football pitch-sized chip production areas are thousands of times cleaner than the operating room, and dim yellow lighting prevents ultraviolet radiation from damaging certain chemicals used in the production process. Lab workers and factory technicians, wearing white protective clothing, masks and goggles from head to toe, work editing in what looks like creepy lighting tones.
In clean rooms, most operations are performed automatically by vacuum-sealed robots, where parts between them are moved on a lifting monorail. Depending on the design, each chip may take 1,000 to 2,000 steps to produce.
The cost of each blank wafer entering the factory floor is several hundred dollars. By the time they left the fab, they already had billions of transistors printed on them, and their value had increased more than a hundred times. Most of the chips made by Global Foundries end up in mobile phones or specialized hardware called GPUs that power video games, AI and cryptocurrency mining.
Connected devices such as fitness trackers, smart refrigerators and smart speakers (collectively known as the Internet of Things) are another growing family of end devices. “People always want to be associated with more things,” Belfie said. ”
The next stage of the silicon journey is usually delivered to electronics manufacturers in other countries. Isabelle Ferain, central engineering director at Global Foundries, said: “I am proud to be a part of the semiconductor industry, which has contributed to strengthening the connections between people around the world. “When I look at the electronic devices i use every day, I can see the technology we’re working on. ”
Semiconductors are the fourth largest export commodity after aircraft, automobiles and oil. Most of the semiconductor industry’s revenue is spent on developing new products.
There are two of the most invested industries in the field of research, one in the pharmaceutical industry and the other in semiconductors. “We’re in an industry that’s changing the world,” Ferain said. “It’s a
It is not surprising that chipmakers are closely protecting their technological secrets. “Intellectual property is the lifeblood of the semiconductor industry,” says John Nofer of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
But many countries are trying to develop semiconductor technology. China is the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors, but only a small fraction of the chips used are homemade.
In 2017, China imported $260 billion worth of chips, the country’s largest single import. China Semiconductor’s goal in the future is to be more self-sufficient, with 40 percent of self-researched semiconductor devices produced by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025. As a result, more and more Chinese companies are producing their own chips.