I did not want to go *that* deep. That's hiding just under the silicon layer, and if we probed too deep, it would escape, and I would not be able to show you this video :(

@@JeffGeerling good idea, would be dangerous to reveal the secrets of the magic smoke

As long as the smoke stays inside you should be fine. 👍

ahh i have a magic keyboard and mouse... i can accidentally (seriously!) kill a server at the opposite side of the city im in! im dangerous but very curious... the bits that live with the magic smoke are ultra secret! im fascinated by this! its fascinating!!

I thought the smoke was just a byproduct of the Imp getting annoyed and portaling out of there 😊

That's why I regularly run a program that does nothing more than just count up. The philosophical humor of "seeing" electrons do literally nothing of importance at our whim.

remember at the end of the wicker man when they stuck nick cage's head into a computer?

Millions of nerds you say?

The crazy things they can build up in the space of a few mm^2 is mind-blowing.

And yet, these inductors are much bigger than the transistors

Hehe, sounds like the first time I tried running an older AMD cpu without the little heatsink it came with. It was fine until it wasn't, and a pop and a smell was heard! They didn't have the same kind of thermal protections in the chips back then!

@@JeffGeerlinggood old skt 462 Athlon’s. Zero thermal sensors and absolutely zero thermal protection!

Magic Smoke is an electronic engineer's nightmare.

Yeah; I actually asked how they make them-it's a third party that makes these probes, but the way they're made is pretty resilient. I would've thought they could break just by being handled roughly, but apparently they are pretty resilient (all things considered), unless you intentionally bend one!

​@@JeffGeerling They're etched. You can actually make those probes at home. Yes, really! They are, ironically, the easiest part of this whole setup. ~100nm tips are possible using a bench power supply and some kitchenware, going below requires some prep, but it's all just chemical/electrolytic etching. The multi-axis nanopositioners, on the other hand, are quite complicated.

​@Spirit532 are there any videos that you can point us to that show the way these probes are made?

@@mr.davemaeen8136 Look up "tungsten probe etching", lots of papers and articles on that.

It was in some ways harder back then, without some of the modern tools and much slower ones that did exist. But complexity grows so as tools get better designs also scale up!

Close to magic, but I'm also amazed these bits of machinery were all designed like 50-80 years ago, they're just better today but not fundamentally different.

@@JeffGeerling Wow. I would've thought that it originated in the 2000's.

@@JeffGeerlingnope, not fundamentally different, but phenomenally better. Back when I was in school, way back during the ice age, my junior high and high schools had donated transmission electron microscopes. The most common one we had was mid-60's vintage, with a early '70's vintage as our flagship TEM. While they might, just might've had the resolution to see most of the features on these chips, they'd also have destroyed the chip, due to their higher beam current. Alas, by the time our kids went to the same schools, those electron and even the optical microscopes were gone. High school chemistry class no longer used reagents, they literally used jars of M&M's. No wonder kids get out of school and need a minimum of a year of remedial teaching in college today!

@@spvillano It's amazing how incremental improvements stack up over decades. Just like one generation to the next of something like the iPhone wasn't always that noticeable-try the original vs a new iPhone today and there's not even the same league, in terms of speed, sound, screen, battery life... everything! (Despite the iPhone being a slightly worse example than microscopy).

@@JeffGeerlingevery new generation of PC, the first thing I do is slap a VM on it and load DOS and Win 3.11. It's been years now that the full GUI is up in the amount of time a POST test used to take. As for electron microscopes, the improvements are vast. Our old 1960's models had x-ray hazard warnings if the beam current was set to the higher settings (which would burn through the specimen grid anyway), now, they use a fraction of the beam current for higher quality magnification and imaging. I seriously believe that my grandkids will likely be using stuff straight out of Star Trek by the time they're in their 30's.

I still remember when PLL's used to drive many consumer electronics tech crazy trying to figure them out. No mystery, one just needed to actually understand the theory of operation. Later, saw much the same concept barrier lay up many a tech over SMPS units, similar failure to comprehend the necessity of precise feedback.

I wonder what we’re going to do as transistors continue to shrink. I assume we will be hard limited to the atomic radius of silicon itself.

Yeah... creative packaging can still get a little more 3D, but at some point, I imagine we'll have to find a way to 'grow' circuits instead of 'print' them, to get any reliability when we get closer to atoms.

Heh, those ancient SEM's likely would vaporize those chips, if they managed to get the things to emit and begin scanning controllably. If they ever want to light one of them up and actually have it function, they're free to call and I'll help out. I still remember how most of those circuits work, so restoration shouldn't be too hard and it'd be worth renewing my passport for. I'm old enough to have worked with both electrostatic beam handling and electromagnetic beam handling. I'd also love to see that SEM in the modern lab's vacuum pump. I remember when plasma volatilizing organics would create a new task of changing out the oil from the pump.

Strange, I couldn't hear it with my volume turned all the way up and my desk studio monitors-but maybe it's something outside of my hearing range? I included the audio from that pendulum clock for the Apple II, and it might just be the background noise from that clip :(

I just went back and heard it too. It wasn't painful though but I am on speakers not headphones.

@@ssgLunchbox Ah, if you have it turned up loud enough (or have *really* good tweeters and it's turned up enough), there definitely is a pretty high frequency sound coming through from that pendulum clip. I'm not sure if I can tweak it using the limited editing tools UKposts permits. I will have to add in an edit step for rolling off the EQ for any clips I pull in from outside sources, and sorry about your ears, yikes!

@@JeffGeerling Don't worry my ears are just sensitive to high frequencies, most people probably won't hear it, luckily they aren't bleeding :P

Heard it almost immediately myself as well. And im on 50% volume both on the video and the PC, and wearing headphones. Not the end of the world and in fact a lot of youtube videos have this problem because the editors cant hear it themselves, whether due to age or damaged hearing.

cap

😳

🤮

What. They showed me a stack of 30 other laptops with the exact same problem, from just that week alone. I'm just a statistic here.

Sorry about that-I didn't catch it in the edit, it came through from that Apple II pendulum clock clip :(

Heh, I wish *UKposts* thought so.

vampires

What he said was "amperage, at a particular gate voltage". There's a relation between these two values for a transistor.

He's definitely NOT a tech and lacks basic understanding of basic electronics. He is annoying. OLD tech Precision eq repaint, PBX and Sonnet have general class FCC license...

yes a relat5ion and how he talks is not correct. stop making excuses.@@boneappletee6416

True

Yeah, but AI's biggest advance was replacing the goblins. Unfortunately, they replaced them with gremlins. Then, fed them after midnight...

Often the test equipment is even more fascinating, because it has to get down to accuracy that's even better than the devices they test!

Ah true. I was mostly trying to get across the concept that it's light being all crazy either way, but it's better to be precise!

This is a good point, and you're right, I tried to keep things down to a lower level and not get into the muddy mess of what a process node is and feature size vs minimum resolution, all that fun stuff. I more wanted to explore the tiny nature of modern silicon in general, hopefully helping some people get into this miniature world and learn more themselves. I find it fascinating!

Heh, we'll get there!

It works, with a lot of caveats. I don't want to do another video on it until I have a few more cards up.

Some people are running Asahi on their Macs, and the experience is good as long as you can live without some of the features :( Otherwise, I know a few people running Ubuntu on Lenovo and have a decent experience. Otherwise, Fedora, but it seems like Ubuntu has a little more momentum still for the 'everyday' user, especially if coming from macOS. macOS is still great though-I would consider running a Linux OS inside of UTM or something like that, so you can have the best hardware and still try out Linux on it.

@@JeffGeerling Right now, I'm actually running OrbStack. I found it while looking for a MacOS equivalent of WSL, as I like having the ability to run a couple quick commands as a sanity test. OrbStack fits the bill quite nicely! Don't get me wrong, I like the UI on my mac well enough. I think I just want to daily a linux tiling manager for a try.

How do they put the silicon there so precisely, and how do they even get started creating a chip?

@@DoubleF3lix The wikipedia page on "Semiconductor Device Fabrication" will take you through pretty much the whole manufacturing process. One thing to note is that we don't really put silicon in places, it actually gets removed. As for the development steps, it is years of work to bring any chip into the physical world. First up is a long period of conceptual design and planning where the architecture of the chip is meticulously put together from existing IP blocks or new units entirely. After this the design is put into simulation and virtual testing to make sure different parts can actually work together. Sometimes small test chips are sent off to be fabricated toward the end of this. There are for example CPUs with a single P-core and 4 E-cores on them that have almost nothing else, just enough to probe away at. Once the initial design is finalized it is "taped out" or sent to be produced. These initial chips will be flawed and that's the point. There's some stuff you don't know until there's hardware in your hands. This is where the revisions start happening. Flaws get patched out and reworks are done at different levels of the chip as needed until a final product is ready. At this point it's probably going to have to launch in some capacity like Cannon Lake or Lakefield, but if the design does well a proper release of that fixed version can happen. This chip is a C0 stepping, which should mean it is the 1st version (no modifications) of their 3rd redesign. I've seen chips go as far as E7 before, but most of the time management will force something flawed but functional through to keep shareholders happy. Both of those products above are some that did that at Intel, and Meteor Lake is partially another one with the desktop side never launching.

Heh, true! Wish there were more open designs, even RISC-V chip manufacturers seem to not be as open with their IP as I think most of us would like.

@@JeffGeerling Its sad there's not a lot of good open source blocks.

Even a "simple" chip like one of these SoCs is a 3-5 year effort, and there are so many little IP blocks inside that I'm sure some of it never even gets exposed to us end users. Like I know there are at least two or three features on the chip that aren't exposed to Linux at all!

it big task is the write the TRM for these SoC and peripherals chips.