Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

We often use all kinds of electronic or electrical products in our daily work and life, such as computers, mobile phones, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and so on.

These products, if we take it apart, we will see a green board like the following.

Sometimes it is blue or black, as we all know, this green board is called a circuit board. The more official name is printed circuit board, that is, PCB (Printed Circuit Board, sometimes called PWB,Printed Wire Board abroad).

In PCB, a lot of electronic components are welded, such as capacitors, resistors, inductors and so on.

We can also see that there are some black square elements.

Yes, this component is probably a chip (called chip in English).

The definition chip of █ chip is actually a relatively general term.

For electronic equipment, it is hidden inside, and it is very important, which is equivalent to the engine of a car and the heart of a person, so it is called "core". From the point of view of form, it is called "piece" because it is piece by piece. Taken together, it is a "chip".

Usually, a chip is an integrated circuit (integrated circuit). You can draw an equal sign between the two and exchange them with each other.

Integrated circuits are relatively easy to define. Through specific technology, transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes and other electronic components are integrated on a single substrate to form a microcircuit, called integrated circuit.

If this substrate is made of a semiconductor material (such as silicon), or if an integrated circuit is made from a semiconductor wafer, it is a semiconductor integrated circuit.

In our traditional sense, integrated circuits basically refer to semiconductor integrated circuits. Therefore, sometimes the words semiconductor, chip and integrated circuit are often mixed.

If meticulous, there are still some differences between chips and integrated circuits.

The view of some industries is that:

An integrated circuit is a circuit and a basic unit, which mainly emphasizes the realization of a certain function, such as a logical operation. This term is more often used in scenarios such as circuit design.

The chip is a more macroscopic and more product-oriented concept. After design, manufacture, packaging and testing, the product form that can be used directly is considered to be a chip. When emphasizing the use, people will use the term "chip" more often, such as CPU chip, AI chip, baseband chip and so on.

Others define a chip as "a general-purpose semiconductor component product that contains one or more integrated circuits and can achieve a specific function". In other words, a chip is a general term for semiconductor component products.

By contrast, the difference between semiconductors and integrated circuits is clearer:

Semiconductors include: integrated circuits + discrete devices + optoelectronic devices + sensors.

The main difference between integrated circuits and the other three is the degree of integration. The number of transistors in integrated circuits is much larger than that of discrete devices, optoelectronic devices and sensors. In addition, the substrate materials are generally different.

At present, the market size of optoelectronic devices, discrete devices and sensors together accounts for only about 10% of the total semiconductor market.

Therefore, we can say that integrated circuits are the most important part of semiconductors.

The classification chip of █ chip is a set of circuits to achieve specific functions. It has the characteristics of modularization, which can facilitate manufacturers to quickly carry out product design and research, reduce the difficulty of development and shorten the development cycle.

For decades, with the rapid development of semiconductor technology under the guidance of Moore's Law, the size of the chip is getting smaller and smaller, and there are more and more circuits in it, which greatly reduces the volume, cost and power consumption of electronic products.

It has not only improved our quality of life, but also led the information technology revolution and promoted the progress of the entire human civilization.

With the chip, there is a mobile phone. Today, chips have formed a very wide range of applications, but also derived from many categories.

The classification of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (World Semiconductor Trade Statistics,WSTS) is more authoritative and official. They classify all categories of integrated circuits into Analog, Micro, Logic and Memory.

At the unofficial level, classification is relatively casual.

According to the function, we often divide the chip into: computing chip, memory chip, communication chip, perception chip, energy chip, interface chip.

There are several types of chips that we are familiar with:

According to the grade, the chip can be divided into consumer grade, industrial grade, automotive grade, military grade and aerospace grade and so on. According to the design concept, it can also be divided into general chips (CPU, GPU, etc.) and special chips (AISC).

We can also divide it according to the process, such as 28nm, 14nm, 7nm, 5nm, which we often hear. Or, according to semiconductor materials, such as silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride (GaN), etc. We will introduce these later when we talk about the chip manufacturing process.

In fact, in addition to electric chips, we have also developed optical chips (such as silicon optical technology), which use light instead of current to transmit signals.

From the point of view of integrated circuits, there are many classifications.

According to the manufacturing process, integrated circuits can be divided into semiconductor integrated circuits and film integrated circuits (metal and ceramics are used in film integrated circuits). Thin film integrated circuits are divided into thick film (thick-film) integrated circuits and thin film (thin-film) integrated circuits.

According to the circuit properties, we can also be divided into digital integrated circuits, analog integrated circuits and mixed-signal integrated circuits.

Digital integrated circuits, as the name implies, deal with digital signals. It appears most around us, such as microprocessors (CPU, GPU, etc.), digital signal processors (DSP) and microcontrollers (MCU), all of which are digital integrated circuits.

Analog integrated circuits, mostly used in sensors, power chips, operational amplifiers, etc., are mainly used for analog signal amplification, filtering, demodulation, mixing and other functions.

Mixed-signal integrated circuits are analog and digital circuits integrated on a single chip. You should be able to guess that modular (ADC) and digital-to-analog (DAC) converter chips fall into this category.

According to the number (scale) of microelectronic devices integrated on the chip, integrated circuits can be divided into the following categories:

More professionally, according to the conductive type, integrated circuits can also be divided into bipolar integrated circuits and unipolar integrated circuits.

Bipolar integrated circuits have complex fabrication process and high power consumption, which represent the types of integrated circuits such as TTL, ECL, HTL, LST-TL, STTL and so on.

Monopole integrated circuits have the advantages of simple fabrication process, low power consumption, and easy to be made into large-scale integrated circuits, such as CMOS, NMOS, PMOS and so on.

The above nouns will be explained in detail when you introduce the working principle of the chip.

The internal structure of the █ chip as mentioned earlier, the chips all look like black squares.

Sometimes, it also has a silver metal cover (enhanced protection, but also conducive to heat dissipation). For example, our CPU:

CPU cover plate

The CPU look-and-feel chip becomes like this after it is encapsulated, a process in the chip manufacturing process.

Only when we remove the "shell" can we really see the inner core of the chip. If you zoom in with a microscope, it goes like this:

The outer circle is the pin (pin). A thin line is a lead. The square in the middle is the real circuit of the chip.

If you continue to zoom in, it goes like this:

Switch to 3D, and it goes like this:

Yes, it is three-dimensional, there are many layers, dense, like a super maze, but also like a future city.

In the picture, one by one, all are connected. And the object they are connected to is the transistor.

The number of transistors in a chip usually represents the ability of the chip. The more transistors there are, the more circuits there are, and the more powerful the functions and calculations are. Nowadays, when many manufacturers release chips, they always emphasize how many transistors there are in the chip. That's what it means.

Nvidia's H100 GPU has 80 billion transistor chips ranging from simple (relatively speaking) to complex. Some complex chips will also be divided into different functional modules. These modules together form a system and become SoC (System on Chip, system-on-chip, system-on-chip).

Our main mobile phone chips, such as Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Tianji and Huawei Kirin, are all typical SoC chips. The chip includes CPU, GPU, APU, ISP, baseband, RF, and so on.

So, the question is, why can the transistors in the chip do all kinds of work, such as computing, storage and so on?

What do we often mean by logical gates, MOSFET, FinFET and PN knots?

To be continued.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fresh Jujube classroom (ID:xzclasscom), author: Xiaozaojun

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