In various news about chip technology progress and the Sino-US trade war, we often see some nanoscale units, which are often used to measure the level of development of chips.
< br >
Talking about the chip process, we should start with the origin of the computer. Born in the University of Pennsylvania a vacuum tube computer, this computer is also the world's first general purpose computer.
< br >
This computer uses vacuum tubes, its main memory uses a complex and large electromagnetic structure, and the external memory uses magnetic tape. Due to its complex structure and lack of integration, the computer is so large that it would take an entire room to fit it.
< br >
？
At that time, the computer did not have the concept of central processing unit, it can be said that it is a huge CPU. Twelve years later, a company in the United States made an all-transistor computer, which integrated transistors on the circuit board, and through this method of calculation, the computer entered the transistor era. Computer components have two characteristics: integration and miniaturization, but at this time the computer still does not have the concept of CPU. With the development of The Times, scientists have found another way to calculate, that is, to embed transistors on the circuit board, but this way is still a waste of space.
< br >
In such a large circuit board embedded with transistors, the number of transistors is limited, and its number limits the calculation speed. In order to better comply with the needs of miniaturization and integration, the integrated circuit was produced in this case, which placed many transistors on a small semiconductor chip, becoming the predecessor of the CPU. Later, the large-scale integrated circuit computer appeared, the transistor computer became a commodity in many families, and the central processing unit became a focus topic.
< br >
We learned that the number of transistors limits the speed of a computer. In theory, the more transistors there are, the faster the computer will be. Then, when designing the CPU, the number of microelectronic devices above is a major consideration for designers.
< br >
Under the condition that the area of the chip is limited, in order to put a large number of microelectronics components, scientists need to constantly think. Scientists want to increase the capacity of microelectronic components on the chip by shrinking the microelectronic components, and experiments have proved that this method is feasible. With the improvement of integrated circuit design accuracy, the spacing that can be carved on the wafer in modern chips has reached 7 nanometers, which also confirms Moore's Law, and the chip manufacturing process we are talking about refers to the spacing of the circuits in the integrated circuit.
In 1947, the first transistor was manufactured at Bell Laboratories in the United States, and before this, the current amplification function could only rely on a large volume, large power consumption, and weak structure of the electron tube.
The transistor has the main function of the electron tube, and overcomes the above shortcomings of the electron tube, so after the invention of the transistor, the idea of integrated circuits based on semiconductors soon appeared. In 1958, the world's first integrated circuit came out, and one of its inventors, JackKilby, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000.
Chip manufacturing is also called integrated circuit manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing, microelectronics industry. The so-called chip, that is, the integrated circuit integrates multiple electronic components on a substrate to complete a certain circuit or system function, and the integrated circuit gradually develops with the miniaturization and high reliability requirements of electronic equipment