Lines in-between the dies are called scribe lines, aka dicing lanes. Since it is space that will not be used by the end customer, the fabs use it to put their own stuff. Usually: alignment marks (to precisely align every layer on top of each other) and test keys for thickness and lateral dimensions measurement to allow monitoring of the manufacturing process. Since those structures must be relatively large for cheaper/faster inspection, fabs don't want to waste usable wafer surface. Thus, their placement in the dicing lane (which will be "eaten" away during the die singulation process). Sometimes this also includes contact pads for probing the chips on a wafer-level (e.g. writing the serial number in the memory), but those usually tend to be on the chip itself. Source: working in the semiconductor industry.

@Horus9339

8 ай бұрын

Thank you, very informative statement. Merry Christmas Sir, Health and Happiness to you and yours.

@checkmeowt2938

8 ай бұрын

you beat me to it. I run CNC machines as well, so I was surprised Roman didn't immediately think it was for aligning in the cutting process. Especially after mentioning they get cutout. I do the same thing when machining all sorts of materials that i have to put into a different machine after, like going from the regular CNC into a CO2 CNC laser for example with the same project. always end up making scribe lines help me orient and especially alignment on the new deck surface easy to match my zero. Very cool video!

@AerFixus

8 ай бұрын

That area can also be called "kerf" (source: also working in semi)

@TheFPSPower

8 ай бұрын

Yeah those patterns immediately looked like something you'd use for alignment, not really probe points. Thanks for your insight.

@alpha007org

8 ай бұрын

I was thinking it was some internal binary code. Thank you for explaining.

The forbidden waffle

@TheHighborn

8 ай бұрын

Most expensive bite of your life

@FR4M3Sharma

8 ай бұрын

Gay waffle

@OKNOWIMMAD12345678

8 ай бұрын

Cronch

@maxfmfdm

8 ай бұрын

Its not forbidden if I'm in international waters

@SwordQuake2

7 ай бұрын

Not if you're doctor Ian Cutriss

Amazing video. It is so nice that you provide us with such videos of things we would otherwise never have seen

the look of enthusiasm on your face is contagious :-) some people like theme parks, some people like concerts but give Roman a wafer and he is happy!

@ssl3546

8 ай бұрын

the dude has the most blessed life as it is, he's not your run of the mill youtuber

@orora667

8 ай бұрын

I'll give my kidneys to have one of those meteor lake wafer, I'll watch them on microscope everyday

@zasuvkazasuvkovic498

7 ай бұрын

*So buy one CPU, delided it and polish.* 😆@@orora667

The parts around the boarder are to help measure layer thickness. It helps troubleshoot issues with yield every mask layer leaves a square. That the metrology tool can measure. So if you have a loss you can verify what layer had the issue from the sits in between die

Years ago, a surplus electronics store I shopped at got a whole bunch of wafers in. Supposedly, they were rejected RAM wafers. (30 cm/12") I had thought about buying one and turning it into a clock. Looking at this video, I wish I had. Gorgeous.

Incredible how advanced human civilization has gotten in a short period of time when so many people work together on these innovations. This looks like alien technology! Imagine in 100 more years! Great Video!

@phil1pd

7 ай бұрын

Totally agree Its crazy to think only 150 years after the invention of the light bulb we have the technology that we have today.

@Dude-xv4os

5 ай бұрын

Even imagine in just 5 years! These packaging technologies are going to be insane. Whats coming after zen 6? It will not be zen 7! Its supposed to be something completely new.

Those lines between the dies are also known as scribe lanes. This is where you will, among other things, find alignment marks that are used by photolithography machines to align layers on a wafer.

I love-hate how it's always the same story : the engineering part is so exciting regardless of the company bringing it, it's always when it comes to marketing that sh*t hits the fan and everything gets dirty.

@shaneeslick

8 ай бұрын

Yeah Funny how for years now intel Marketing has been saying that Chiplets won't work because you can't glue them together & then when proven wrong with Zen3 it changed to Chiplet design is way to slow because of Interconnect & can't compete with Monolithic, yet now this is the direction they are going too & has happened after getting lots of AMD Staff to come on board. Seems intel Marketing Heads went to the DT University & follow his Mantra of "Just Lie, our devoted supporters/customers are too STOOPID to do any real research to know the Truth"

@Thisandthat8908

8 ай бұрын

currently more pissed off at AMD for making their "partners" sabotage DLSS in every game.

@shaneeslick

8 ай бұрын

@@Thisandthat8908 Yet I guess not pissed off at nVIDIA in the first place for Sabotaging not only AMD Owners but even their own previous Gen Owners from being able to use DLSS by making it Hardware specific unlike FSR & XESS, Don't choke on your Green Kool Aid.

@mylarrito

8 ай бұрын

@@Thisandthat8908 do you have a source for that?

@whiteerdydude

7 ай бұрын

​@@Thisandthat8908source? And even if that's true, why is THAT the most irritating thing amongst the sea of incredibly anti consumer practices

Very cool! I just love seeing this stuff. Thanks to Intel Deutschland for this amazing access. It would be really nice to take a step back and look at the lithography process as well, particularly ASML EuV process.

Nice, would be useful if an engineer explained the different parts of the wafer.

@Noname-km3zx

8 ай бұрын

That would be so much better, but they would say too much and would need to be checked for intellectual property loss fear.

@AndrewZonenberg

8 ай бұрын

What you need is an *outside* engineer not bound by NDA. They'll know less, and some stuff will be educated guesses rather than definite, but they'll be able to speak freely and at least explain the obvious parts.

Awesome stuff 👍 Forward some extra appreciation for this onto Intel. Really appreciate the extra insight and engineering info in these kinds of videos and they should send you more samples and info.

Absolutely amazing stuff, and those VHX microscopes are damn impressive too. I've used older models at a prior job and they've got some really impressive features you'd never think a microscope could or should have

Thank you for providing everything that we would never seen There are only in depth die shot of i386 or 486 on the web, never with latest new chips like this

My mind just blew up and nobody even saw it lol... Crazt tech!!!!!!! Thank you. I really injoyed ur videos.

CPU tech is so damn cool, i cant get enough of closeup pics of wafers like in this vid, awesome stuff!

Crazy eyes of excitement!!! Happy day for you.

A friend of mine owns a very large 3d printing company and sent me one of these wafers to use as a print bed. It works brilliantly.

Wow, awesome video..its so cool seeing the cou dies on the wafer.. really lets you know how intricate the engineering is that goes into creating CPUs. Id love to see s video on how the CPUs are cut out of the wafer too.

0:40 Nice colours spectrum starting @ 4:08 is all I can get excited about in this video lol

The biggest advantage of using chiplets is yield. The smaller the process the more errors per mm². So the smaller you make the desired die the more likely you are to get a error free result. The more error free dies the more value that can be extracted from each wafer. Yielding more profit and perhaps more savings to the customer.

@AlfaPro1337

8 ай бұрын

Why do you think P4D and early version of C2D/Q the pricing get diminished over a long periods of time? Meanwhile, AMD charges an exorbitant for a glorified low-end 6c (US$300-350, when at that price, pre-Evil Su, it's AMD's top-end with an increased in core count, PX4 9600 > P2X6 1090T > FX-8150) and their highest HEDT flagship. I thought 7/9980XE US$2K was the worst, but man, AMD/Evil Su takes the cake!

@acarrillo8277

8 ай бұрын

@@AlfaPro1337 I feel like you are ignorant of economics and inflation rates here. For example the PX4 9600 when it launched in 2007 was $283, in today's dollars that would be $419. For contrast the r5 7600x launched at $290, that would be $150 in 2007 dollars. So yes their prices per unit have actually come down. Intel's competition for the 7600x is the i5-13600k launched at $319. AMD's prices coming up are a byproduct of economics as well because they are actually competitive with Intel so they have every reason to charge a closer price for product. HEDT is a completely different market then mainstream and both Intel and AMD charge exorbitant prices for their platforms and CPUs. They can do this because these are pieces of equipment that people actually make money with. As for pricing, the Sapphire rapids boards are a little cheaper but they launched more than 6 months ago so that's understandable. The base model Threadripper part in this outing is $1499 for a 24c/48t part with the r9 7960x. To get that thread count out of sapphire rapids you would need to buy the w7-3455 and that runs $2489. But that isn't even fair because it has been shown that the AMD Bergamo cores out perform the Intel sapphire rapids cores. So who is overcharging?

@WarisAmirMohammad

8 ай бұрын

@@AlfaPro1337 u aight?

@mikezappulla4092

8 ай бұрын

⁠ you asking a question and then answering it yourself. That’s a sign of a mental illness.

@TheOne2Know

8 ай бұрын

Off topic here, @acarrillo8277 but I gotta say your a man of great taste sporting that profile pic :) Discovered Macross and Robotech in 95 or 96, was my jam, read all the Jack McKinney (McKenney?) Robotech books as a kid and a decade later once broadband had been invented and the internet proliferated was able to watch all the shows as well! Hadnt thought about it in years till I saw your profile pic... Anyways have a good day!

Art for some people: An old painting made by a well known artist. Art for nerds: CPU Wafer I would (if I could even afford stuff like that) but the Wafer over an equal cost painting, any day. These look really cool, always have and always will.

@OjStudios

8 ай бұрын

Silicon Wafers can be had for a little over a hundred euros a pop. Defective or otherwise discarded but beautiful none the less.

Your videos output is insane! 💪🏻Jealous.

Love it. Wish we had more coverage about the wizardry of the computers we use on a daily basis

This is awesome. I love these deep dives into hardware.

How much for a waffle? It is mind blowing that this is all done by light to imprint into the wafer.

@RayanMADAO

8 ай бұрын

Probably like 10k

@mycelia_ow

8 ай бұрын

They're pretty cheap at Walmart or iHop for a freshly cooked one.

@mycelia_ow

8 ай бұрын

@@RayanMADAO I think defective wafers are much cheaper

@mycelia_ow

8 ай бұрын

@@RayanMADAO This Intel 4 wafer is over $100,000

The area in between two dies is scribe street and the things placed in between the scribe are to test the various components and their parameter

That was a awesome video to watch! Thank You and keep up the good work!!

The LTT version of this video would be "Cool, lets see how far we can throw it"

@fleurdewin7958

8 ай бұрын

Or can we make a pizza on top of a silicon wafer and bake it in an oven 🤣

@darkmann12

8 ай бұрын

@@fleurdewin7958 long shot but maybe keep it warm on top of a PC!

@luminatrixfanfiction

8 ай бұрын

Or Linus accidentally drops it and the whole room goes eerily quiet.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Damn! Zooming around a wafer through a microscope, now that's my type of art.

@Djuntas

8 ай бұрын

yeah reminds me zooming into a picture in photoshop, just seeing pixels ^^

Look who's "gluing chips together" now (again)

Intel should make a fab in Belgium and call it Belgian wafers! 🥞🔵

This is wild!! I wish I knew I was passionate about computing as a kid. I would love to be in this industry engineering processors. Thank you for showing us this, I feel so much gratitude.

@jamesg7456

8 ай бұрын

I feel ya bro. I should’ve stuck with it

even if intel's marketing is having a meltdown, such incredible feats of engineering are undeniably cool and exciting

@greebj

7 ай бұрын

It's almost like two bits of silicon have never been put on the one PCB connected by an interposer before, it's like Pentium D, Fiji, Tesla, Zen, never happened

just awesome to see the details emerge when zooming in. plz find out what those markings are for on the cut lines.

Need a video overclocking and direct die cooling the wafer. How many cores is that?

really cool video, i've never seen a chip that close before

Great vid, excellent chip stuff thx a lot DB!

Thanks for doing this. Super cool.

This was amazing!

Roman, you should get some B-Roll of the silicon wafer and turn them into wallpapers

the fact that there's billions of tranzistors in each of those squares is mind blowing...

It's kind of weird calling Emerald Rapids just a refresh, it is so much better than Saphire Rapids, in some workloads it's almost 2 gens ahead. The Cores are mostly the same but everything around it is different.

@greebj

7 ай бұрын

They're surprisingly competitive for half the core count of Epyc, but it's a pity a lot of those new functions are disabled as you go down the product stack. On the face of it, a bit silly trying to force the upsell on their customers in the face of AMD eating into their server market share as they are

The stuff between the die are for metrology and registration.

The stuff in the scribe lines are usually electrical test structures

Oh wow, very strange looking CPU with the visible lines separating the different dies Also triggers my OCD in how they don't fit together perfectly!

great video. thank you.

Very cool technology and should really take off with the Intel 20A node. Meteor Lake is looking to be a mild performance and efficiency improvement, but it is a teething phase after all; I think we'll see better gains on Arrow Lake, even if it is more desktop-optimized.

The wafer really puts perspective on the "wizards inscribing arcane sigils into sand" meme

Thanks for sharing!

Love how open Intel is with their facilities and products. You never see TSMC or Samsung inviting journalists to come see what theyve been cooking up. Both Meteor Lake and Emerald rapids are looking good in their reviews too.

@PyromancerRift

8 ай бұрын

They are the bottom of the barrel in terms of high tech, they have nothing to hide.

@user-nr2uu5lw7y

8 ай бұрын

tsmc is secret, samsung is an another level secret lol😅.

Amazing! crazy how far tech has come in just a short time humans man we are just something else.

Always interesting!

Oh man that was cool!

something tells me tiled chiplet designed cpus will LOVE a good lapping session...

Way cool stuff, thanks.

Thank you for making the video in English too

I wonder if for enthusiast CPUs they could replace the iGPU tile with a Cache tile.

@christianrobloxserver7282

8 ай бұрын

Thats.... not how it works lol

@mikezappulla4092

8 ай бұрын

@@christianrobloxserver7282well put. lol.

Wafers are soo cool to look at but im just curious as to why they're circle and not square? Im sure they would have thought about it but i just want to know the reason behind it.

@rounakdutta6211

8 ай бұрын

Wafers are circular because, IC fabrication requires the silicon to be monocrystalline (i.e., the silicon lattice aligned in one direction). To make monocrystalline silicon, the process is such that naturally the silicon mass (called ingots or boules) becomes cylindrical during the solidification from the molten state, and then they are finally sliced off to be circular. It's difficult to explain the process in words, but you can search for how silicon wafer/ monocrystalline silicon is made on youtube for visual representation.

@deepakjr457

8 ай бұрын

@@rounakdutta6211 Thanks for the detailed explanation but i got lost after the part where they get cylindrical during the solidification. I will search for it as its really interesting and thanks again for your time to explain

Those features in the dicing streets are test structures, maybe for thickness or what have you, since they are refracting light. Alignment marks are probably in there as well.

DerBauer, the connection between us earthlings and rocket science.

thats so cool, thanks!

4:49 *Igor's nuts*

This is SO cool to see. Thanks and thanks to Intel Germany

Excellent video. Well done sir! Brings back memories of my days at Hughes Aircraft as a chip designer. Then it was 2" wafers and 4 micron feature size. Early to mid 1980s.

Intel has and is doing a lot of smart things. They tend to hand tours to tech channels out much more than the likes of AMD does for one, and often they let those same people play around with some stuff too. AMD tours tend to be more "oh look at this" and not "ye you can hold it and look a bit further into it here". I know this a 1 in 1 billion chance, but I've yet to see AMD be this transparent.

@TheFulcrum2000

8 ай бұрын

Check GamersNexus they had a complete AMD tour a while back.

This is my favorite type of content

Nice!!! Very Cool

Did you pinch yourself to make sure it wasn’t a dream? So cool

"At its Xeon CPU launch event, Intel accused AMD’s Epyc chips as being an “inconsistent” and “repurposed desktop product” with “glued-together” dies."

@InternetListener

8 ай бұрын

They also launched Pentium 60 with never ending division per zero, so, I Guess, they have checked for sure the new possibilities of cuting cost as AMD does while keeping big oportunities for creating new and until now impossible tiles and mosaics of different security bugs and discover hardware interferences and compatibility issues... someone needs to care about earnign money while wasting energy, resources and creating blues and black error screens... not fair only AMD does that with x86 legacy...

If Intel comes back have them talk about the technology they employ to make the chip. No "state secrets" but stuff that makes people like me want to own the technology. I already have a laptop but if someone makes a itx board with this cpu, I'll buy it. I am into mini pcs with BGA cpu's. I still have my AMD E-350 running my Pfsense router. I have old celerons that I used as clients in my network testing. But all are retired now. I need them to stay relevant for 5 years. Thanks for all your hard work!

Are the markings between wafers reference guidelines for cutting maybe?

absolutely majestic

Okay, I love this

is like playing tetris while designing a cpu. Crazy interesting video.

I'm glad you had this opportunity. It's magnificent what our customers can create. So many details and features.

I’m surprised they let you handle the wafer with your hands. Usually that’s considered cringe in the semiconductor world. They have vacuum wands or tweezers if they need to be handled by hand.

With the most important part of the chip: photo-lithography courtesy of ASML 👌☺👍

Not sure why but this meteor lake launch has a really strange vibe...

omg, GLUE! a Glued cpu i cant belive intel did that Snake Oil is real!

I always love seeing the "German Engineered Perfection" and then it cuts to those ears lols......

I really want one of those wafers in clear epoxy as a display. And Intel please make a gaming cpu with just 8 fast cores 125w tdp great idle power no useless igpu and a ton of cache! Can cost the same of the 14900k for all i care.

@greebj

7 ай бұрын

There's already a product that has 8 fast efficient cores great for gaming. 7800X3D.

@pino_de_vogel

7 ай бұрын

@@greebj Terrible idle power draw tho. and on top of that the motheboards are inefficiënt too. A intel rig uses 35 watts idle less then a AmD 7800X3d rig. Id love to get myself a 7800X3d and almost did then realized the idle power draw and cancelled. That idle power draw over 4 years makes my rig cost 200 more as a intel rig. my pc is on 12-16 hours a day of which i game 2 hours the rest is idle and single core workloads which intel does far far better at. if you calculate all that power draw over the 4 years i do with a pc (currently 5 years already) thats a hefty sum with 1 kWh here being nearly 40 cents. Upgrade path is irrelevant to me as in 4 years we wont be on am5 anymore just like when i bought am4 was the hot ting i got a intel gifted and even if i had am4 now i would not upgrade to a am4 so upgrade pathnis oly for you when you waste money and upgrade for the sake up getting the latest. amd needs to really fix their idle power load. and all 3 these companies need to start realizing power draw is one of the most important factors. My rig uses about 550 kWh a year thats a fuckton of money for just the computer and >25% of my power bill.

glued together

this is extremely cool

it bothers me that the tiles don’t line up at the edges :P

In between the pieces there is stuff for testing. They test the whole wafer before cutting

I'd happily trade a kidney to be able to have a wafer framed and mounted on my wall.

Man it's so cool I wish there waws a good video that explains how they make these things

I don't see any probe pads on the outside of the chips? How do they make electrical contact for wafer sort?

SOC tile is much bigger then id imagined.

Hast du den Durchmesser des Wafers gemessen? Sah für mich spontan nach mehr als 300 mm aus.

smaller well defined packages that can be manufactured on mass, while keeping failure rates at acceptable levels, the push i have noticed is lower power requirement but the same functionality, 4-8 cores/set speeds 3.2-4.0/more pcie lanes/faster ram at a newer gen, once we saturate the cpu to pcie the bottle necks will be back at the cpu again.... full multi processing support cross the board would be nice....🍿

@greebj

7 ай бұрын

AMD did this with Zen, a paper in one of AdoredTV's old Jim videos went through and showed a 20% increase in frequency just from being able to bin multiple chiplets over a monolithic design With also the cost advantage of a smaller die being much higher yielding That Intel is only doing this now shows how badly they were caught with their pants down with Zen 1

@KJ-xt3yu

7 ай бұрын

@@greebj agreed 🍿, and now we wait for the rebound action on there part to see what they will do

I always wanted one of those silicon wafer as decoration, but yeah theyre expensive and its not guaranteed to be an actual wafer...

It's been clear that Intel has the best engineers. It's the executives and marketing 'Suits' who undermine the company and consumers with poorly though out, short-term strategies. Most of the top level people should have an engineering background as opposed to MBA-types who are ethically challenged.

Beautiful 😻

So all those hollywood hacker movies with the electron flying trough a micro city of some kind are real??

Those wafers are cool!

HOW DO YOU KEEP TEMP DIFFERNCE BETWEEN TOP LAYER VS LOWER CAUSING DAMAGE, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW TRUE TEMP AND MAY CAUSE EXPANSION DAMAGES

Does the C in CPU means Cluster of Cores now instead of Central? Cluster Processing Unit?