A few years ago, when the focus was on the chip industry, everyone's topics were "TSMC", "Huawei Kirin chip", "lithography machine" and "card neck".
In the past two years, the focus of everyone's attention has become "chip shortage", "chip price increase", "domestic substitution"...
From "why the chip will be stuck in the neck" to the current "how to alleviate the chip shortage", it can be clearly felt that everyone's understanding of the importance of chips is much deeper.
However, when many students contact the chip industry and want to know more, there will still be a variety of questions to be answered.
So this is a zero-based small white readable, help you quickly grasp the basic knowledge of the chip industry science article. Collection is not a loss.
Chip concept
First distinguish between a few basic concepts: chips, semiconductors, integrated circuits.
Semiconductor: a material with conductive properties between conductors and insulators at room temperature, common semiconductor materials are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and so on. The semiconductor material commonly used in chips is now silicon.
Integrated circuit: A miniature electronic device or component. Using a certain process, the transistors, resistors, capacitors and inductors required in a circuit and other components and wiring are interconnected together, made on a small piece or several small pieces of semiconductor wafer or dielectric substrate, and then encapsulated in a tube shell, becoming a miniature structure with the required circuit function.
Chip: The transistor and other devices needed for a circuit are made on a semiconductor (from Jeff Damer). Chips are carriers of integrated circuits.
Strictly by definition, integrated circuits ≠ chips.
But in a narrow sense, the ICs, chips, and integrated circuits we mention every day are actually no different. The IC industry and chip industry that everyone usually discusses refer to the same industry.
If you summarize in one sentence: the chip is a physical product obtained after using semiconductors as raw materials and designing, manufacturing, and packaging and testing integrated circuits.
When the chip is installed on mobile phones, computers, tablets, it becomes the core and soul of such electronic products.
Mobile phone touch screen needs to have a touch chip, storage information needs to have a memory chip, to achieve communication functions to have a baseband chip, RF chip, Bluetooth chip, want to take a good picture needs GPU... The chips in a mobile phone add up to more than 100.
Chip classification
With so many chips, is there any systematic way to classify it? In fact, there are many ways to classify chips:
According to the processing signal method, it can be divided into: analog chip, digital chip
The signal is divided into analog signals and digital signals, and the digital chip is to process the digital signal, such as CPU, logic circuit, etc.; the analog chip is to process the analog signal, such as operational amplifiers, linear regulators, voltage references, etc.
Most of today's chips have both digital and analog, and there is no absolute standard for which type of product a chip belongs to, and it is usually distinguished according to the core function of the chip.
According to the application scenarios, it can be divided into: aerospace-grade chips, vehicle-grade chips, industrial-grade chips, and commercial-grade chips
Chips can be used in different fields of aerospace, automotive, industrial, and consumer, and the reason for this division is because these fields have different performance requirements for chips, such as temperature range, accuracy, continuous trouble-free running time (life) and so on. For example:
Industrial-grade chips have a wider temperature range than commercial-grade chips, and aerospace-grade chips have the best performance and are also the most expensive.
According to the use of functions can be divided: GPU, CPU, FPGA, DSP, ASIC, SoC...
Just said touch chip, memory chip, Bluetooth chip... It is classified according to the use of functions. There are also companies often say that "our company's main business is CPU chips / WIFI chips", but also from the functional point of view.
Previously wrote a special article to function classification, human body function as an analogy article, interested friends can also learn more about it: "an article to take you to know the chip classification and representative enterprises"
According to the degree of integration, it can be divided into: small-scale integrated circuits (SSI), medium-scale integrated circuits (MSI), large-scale integrated circuits (LSI), very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI)
The degree of integration is to see the number of components integrated on the chip. Now the chips in smart phones are basically ultra-large-scale integrated circuits, which collect hundreds of millions of components.
In fact, this belongs to the early way to express the degree of chip integration, and later in the development process, it is expressed in terms of the size of the feature line width (design benchmark), such as microns and nano. It can also be understood as the process we often call the process.
According to the process process, it can be divided into: 5nm chip, 7nm chip, 14nm chip, 28nm chip...
Nm here actually refers to the gate length of the CMOS device, which can also be understood as the minimum wiring width or the minimum processing size.
Looking at the world, the current more advanced process is TSMC and Samsung's 3nm, but the current yield is not high (Samsung's 3nm yield is only 10-20%). The most advanced process in China is SMIC's 14nm.
The development process of chips is also full of "legendary color", and we need to start from the very famous "Moore's Law" in the IC industry.
Moore's Law
Moore's Law is the experience of Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders.
It is empirical because the "law" is not a law of natural science, but the experience of Gordon Moore after a long period of observation.
In 1965, when Gordon Moore charted a development report, he found a startling trend: the number of transistors that each chip could hold would double in about 18-24 months, and the performance would double.
Moore's Law predicts the size and performance of chips.
In 1971, Intel's first-generation microprocessors had 2300 transistors. In 2007, 45nm processors had more than 800 million transistors. Today, the Kirin 9000 uses a 5nm process with 15.3 billion transistors integrated.
For more than 50 years, the chip industry has been following the prophecies of Moore's Law.
Now the process has approached the "limit", the process process can not be infinitely reduced, and Moore's Law has slowed down in recent years. With the development of technology, Moore's Law will certainly encounter bottlenecks.
But Moore's Law will always be a legendary and colorful stroke in the history of semiconductors.
The more types and functions of the chip, the more people can't help but wonder: how exactly does a chip come to us "cutting through thorns and sanding edges and corners"?
The next article will introduce the whole industry chain of chips and the birth process of chips from scratch.
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