Props to Intel for this visit. I know everyone is bagging a lot on them - and justifiably so at times, but they have a lot of cool people there. When I was a kid I wanted to write an essay about CPUs so I called them (this was before email) and asked for information and they delivered a huge box with manuals, models, posters and stuff to my home (also at a time when home delivery didn't exist where I live). I will always have a soft spot for them for doing all that for a nerdy kid.
Yep. I knew i wouldn't understand, but understand it better knowing that there are hundreds if not thousands of different processes that build the layers or "circuitry "
I was so nervous seeing you wave your hands next to everything. Thanks for sharing, this was great. Shout out to the editors for the time it took to blur so much.
The place was secret. As such, the raw video never left the facility not blurred. Some Intel individuals had to comb over everything prior to giving Linus’ team footage.
I was just about to type the same. Linus saying: "Because taking a machine like this offline for more than a few minutes at a time - very very costly" while violently waving his hands around was nerve wrecking.
My daughter works as a maintenance tech at an intel fab in Portland, OR. She absolutely refuses to tell us anything about what she does other than "I fix machines". She sent me the link to this video as "this is the best I can do of at least showing you what it looks like where I work, they explain more than I'm allowed to say.". I'm glad to get at least some picture!
@@devanshudwivedi5875 Definitive! The clauses in the contracts contain extremely high fines. What is estimated there, will not be paid to you in your whole life.
Watching Linus wave his hands around during this video made me so nervous (especially after the previous video I watched was him dropping a $5000 laser projector). Now I'm definitely clumsy myself, but I feel like Linus is way more confident in his own dexterity and coordination than he should be. Especially with extremely expensive things!
@@shadesofmist9214 To be fair, AMD and Intel are pretty goody-buddy like outside of competing. All people in the same industry usually love either competition, or just the industry in general. Coming in the fab with AMD equipment would probably give them a laugh haha.
I am going to imagine that several percentage of CPUs made this day were made slightly more defective than otherwise thanks to a nearby Linus' wild gesticulations.
@@thunderxr2736 I'm sorry to tell you this but a country's legitimacy comes from the amount of guns that it has, not your feelings. And Israel has all the guns it needs to be legitimate right now.
He was giving me anxiety waving around next to the machines, he jokes about the buttons but if you push the right button at the right time that's a few hundred grand going *poof*, and a big pain in the ass for a lot of people. His handler should have been stricter.
Never in a million years did I think I'd be watching this kind of content on RUclips. You have truly elevated the entire tech industry and helped democratize information for everyone. Thanks so much for everything you and everyone at LTT does.
@@EpicWolverine Right but there's much more info about what goes on inside in research articles. Not nearly as entertaining, but if you're going to be doing anything with the information this video isn't going to be very helpful. Information is "democratized" in the form of public funding for research where the papers on it are public.
great to see my babies (or their grandkids) still in use, i was part of the team to develop those overhead foup carriers for the launch of 300mm wafers back in the day. i was shocked on the amount of people there until i see the 1 thing you forgot to blur. a label on a foup stating the wafers are for testing only and not for sale. i'm guessing they were not running any production and were having a training/maintenance day. in 1 shot alone i seen more people than fabs i've been to had to fully staff the entire production facility.
I'm an electrician that has done a lot of work installing those tools at Intel. Like you I was in complete awe going into the fab for the first time and seeing everything in there. But trust me, after a few weeks of having to put on the bunny suits and go through all the procedures to work in there every day, the novelty of it wears off pretty quick, lol.
The real heroes are the editing crew as they had to go through multiple revisions to get it approved for uploading. What an amazing and informative video, never thought I would see such a magnificent facility
Yes, the footage would have had to go through numerous security reviews before being published. A lot of these probably have been cut and scrubbed clean as they are not allowed to even show the equipment manufacturers and suppliers they use. Also, pretty sure they had lengthy paperwork and orientations even prior shooting.
To be honest it probably didn't cost that much. It's not like they shut anything down for him and it's not actually needed to to have the clean room as clean as it is because the wafers don't usually see fab air as they either travel around in foups or are inside the tools
@@eglandon16 he was referring to the fact that not as many people were at their stations in the area where he said it. He also said that they'd all be manned in normal conditions. That wasn't word for word what we said, but that's the jist of it.
@@craftedinsanity406 lol if you think those stations are ever all manned boy do I have a surprise for you. They are never manned unless we are actively working on a tool. For covid the technician numbers in the fab didn't go down, the only thing different were the engineering teams started working from home.
About a decade ago a guest MBA professor gave a lecture on the overall steps of making a CPU.. the room was full os engineers, business, finance, logistics people, etc.. I remember it very clearly.. the sheer complexity of it all absolutely blew everyone's mind.
As a commercial/industrial electrician doing these kind of projects is as exciting as is what they make. Imagine the time and craftsmanship that goes into that ;)
Probably had someone from intel with them constantly pointing out things to censor and cut, then had the video reviewed and changed hundreds of times by others to be 100% sure nothing ultra secret gets leaked
@william_prlt They were likely given a temp office area to review and edit the footage in a supervised environment, then required to destroy the uncensored media prior to leaving. My company allowed a media outlet in for a tour a few years ago and this was our procedure. We even rented camera equipment for them, so that the only thing they left with was an external hard drive with the edited footage.
I was just waiting for him to error something out! Thought for sure the OHV was about to pick up a FOUP while he was waving his hand above it, not great to happen!
honestly its hard to believe that we as humans went from using swords in battle to melting sand to make computers to process huge tasks, all within a century
I just want to give a shout-out to the editors of this video. The amount of blurred content you guys had to go through must have been insane. Great job on the final result and quality!
“The told me not to touch anything” proceeds to wave hands, body, laptop near all the equipment the rest of the video. I can’t imagine the level of stress those workers had when they find out Linus is extremely clumsy.
He said on the WAN show (I forget which episode but it was April 2022) that a ton of people in the fab knew who he was and wanted to get a picture or an autograph. He said it was a strange realization because he had so much admiration for them and their skill, yet they were so excited to meet him and were big fans lol. It was a cool story I recommend checking it out
He did say most of the staff around were maintenance crew, so maybe Intel let him around to not-poke-at-things when the fab was going through some kind of maintenance cycle?
@@ethanlenning reminds me of the story of Maximilian(big fan of Final Fantasy) meeting Square Enix dev team, and them being fans of his, even watching his reaction video to FF7 Remake reveal as inspiration.
@@Lanka0Kera I guess at the moment they maybe are, 1. they have to prepare for 13th and 14th gen chips 2. there is a building side next to their fab - I guess they will restart full production when that new part of Fab 28 is finished.
I work in semiconductors as a production tech and this video is absolutely amazing. It's so hard to tell people exactly what I do because I can't actually show them but this video shows everything I would want to show them. Explaining all the photolithography, etching, implanting, and even why we gown up top to bottom is kind of daunting and I'm glad Linus is able to explain it all in just a few slides. Thank you for making such an insightful video that I can show my friends and tell them what exactly I do 12 hours a night.
@@renatoigmed 10 nanometers are literally on the order of ~100 of atoms wide. You start getting down to that scale and you're beholden to more quantum mechanical effects than you're really wanting. I don't know much, condensed matter physics is not my field (I work in organic semiconductors for display technology), but the smaller it goes, the more you're going to get interrupted by the electron wavefunctions having some ability to just jump the potential gap. Quantum mechanics, in it's probabilistic nature, means that going smaller than around ~5 nm is gonna be really hard without some novel innovations to exploit these effects or substantially suppress them. Mind, there are some insanely smart cookies working on this stuff, so I'll certainly be pleasantly surprised to see a chip that does it. But, you can only go so low.
Can you imagine the anxiety the staff had watching Linus walking around with the energy he had. I'm honestly surprised he got that far into the tour, with his arms flapping around the way they were.
It's really mindblowing to think about how we, as a species, are capable of engineering things on the nanometer and sub-nanometer scale. Just absolutely wild
My mother worked for Intel for 20+ years and she was surprised that Linus was even let in to the facility. She was happy to see this and brought back memories from long ago when Intel manufactured chips here in the Philippines.
I’ve worked in the chip industry for nearly 15 years and studied semi-conductors in college. This is one of the best intro into how a fab operates I’ve ever seen. Really good job taking such a complex process and breaking it down into simple concepts. Also the amount of blurring you had to do for confidentiality in hysterical to me.
I just retired after working 30 years at the Chrysler minivan plant. And they were strict in the paint shop area. But this stuff is on a level that is insane. Love it.
I got to tour the Hillsboro, OR Fab in December with Dr TechTechPotato himself. It was SO incredibly overwhelming, awesome, stupefying and wonderful. Hope you had the same experience!
My Dad worked at Fab3 in Silicon Valley in the early 80’s on the Pentium team. He holds the patent for the polishing process that’s used after deposition. Of course it’s been updated a ton since then, but he was the first to come up with those brush/slurry polishers. Feel free to reach out Linus if you want more info.
@@mr.inconspicuous6395 100% facts, I agree, no details can be given at all; that being said there’s plenty of room for conversation, especially as pertains to the technology that was definitely cutting edge in the 80’s but really just laid the groundwork for the tech we saw in the video. I guess I was just saying that if they wanted more background or to even see/discuss the OG patent (it is public info after all), that I could put LTT in touch with my pops.
@@mr.inconspicuous6395 edit: I lied, all the Intel specific stuff is still definitely under wraps, but he continued the work for some time at other companies and those patents are indeed public. Fun fact: supposedly somewhere on the P3 chip there’s a nanoscale lithography of the names of the 150ish engineers that helped design the process and the chip. Haven’t ever gotten a chance to break one down and take it to a TEM but it’d be cool to get a pic of his name on the chip somehow some day.
@@daniellabunsky653 Confusing numbering as P5 was the first Pentium, P55 (5.5) was the Pentium MMX, and P6 was the Pentium II. Yet somehow I suspect P3 isn't the 386 shared (under contract) with second source chip makers.
as a sysadmin, all I see in this factory is complete and utter ***STRESS*** - if any machine needs any single, simple step of maintenance or troubleshooting, I'd be sweating bullets, knowing just a minute of downtime could cost tens - hundreds of thousands of lost revenue.. That is crazy! Huge props to any team managing such a factory!
Having played Factorio, meh, just make sure you have a lot of machines that can do the same step, so instead of halting production, capacity decreases while it's down.
Wanna know what's stressfull? Try having to design software or apply a patch in such an environment - you simply pray it works every time! You do get used to it though ;-)
By no means am I a tech expert or I can pretend to understand even a quarter of what's going on here, I'm just a clinician but the enthusiasm and the energy you guys brought to this video is what professionals in a niche field love to see from their guests. It's a huge positive and motivating force. Well done!
Man, my heart was pumping hard seeing Linus walking through the facility, waving his arms and almost touching things. Linus would be the the reason for another chip shortage.
Years ago I was a vendor to a US company that made the chip carriers for Intel. As a senior applications engineer, I was asked to write a CNC routing program that created a precision pocket within the chip carrier for the chip to be imbedded. The equipment was a single spindle vision assisted machine called a "SMART Router". I used a 0.032" router bit to cut the pocket. The tolerance for the routing was +50 microns, -0 microns. Any negative error would destroy the carrier by damaging the gold traces inside the carrier. The router bit would wear in a predictable way so the software could adjust the cutter path on the fly to ensure consistent dimensioning. Otherwise, as the router bit would wear, its diameter would shrink causing the part to fall out of tolerance. There were special .020" pads (fiducials) inside the chip carrier that the vision system would locate and then correct the path of the cutter. There was one room with about 30 of these SMART Routers.
It took YEARS for Intel to deliberate and finally decide to allow the living Dropper inside their factory that's allergic to drops, tremors, and vibrations.
if there would be a symbolic "Stone of Dropping" most people would say "touch it and you will drop items"... some few _wise_ people would say "this stone touched Linus" ;)
I know people like to crap on Intel and AMD, but this really shows how complex and expensive CPU manufacturing is. Honestly, it's bonkers that you can even get a base CPU for $150. It also shows how vulnerable we are as a society. There are very few of these plants around the world...effectively powering our entire modern world.
Yes, exactly. $40 Billion for a process? I don't even want to look at the C.E.O's financial books. To find an investor to bankroll these chips? I'm sorry, you're gonna need more than one. I imagine that whole building costs Trillions over the course of a decade just to build multiple chips at a time. I knew chips making was going to be complicated and expensive... but this video takes that scale to 100.
@@aleksazunjic9672 if that happen probably iran also got some damage too in their internet structure. AMD maybe cannot supply all cpu for whole world. that just worst decision to attck this factory lol but IF that literally happen then maybe we as regular costumer gonna fuckep up lol, just look at 2021, just a virus already make gpu prices high af now imagine if war happen
Would love to see the correlation between the failure rate and Linus’ proximity to those units. Mapped out as a overhead view as a path of destruction through the city.
This makes CPUs seem really good value. The amount of time and resources that go into them. The most precise engineering in the world. Absolutely insane.
What you said! Plus, assuming you bought the correct CPU for your needs, you usually end up using them for multiple years anyway so you totally get your money's worth.
@@lauej If they didn't have the volume in production the price per chip would be a lot more money. That's why they run flat out 24/7 364. Volume keeps the price of R&D down by percentage.
OTOH, this should make you realize that the common folk is a bad estimator of true resource investment from the OEM, hilariously bad actually (diamonds, NFTs…) and that value is perceived. This should make us grateful and also fierce defenders of genuine competition, if the only fab in the world was this one and Intel had a monopoly, you’d never think anyone could do it better or cheaper.
You'll be pleased to know that this video is now being shared around Intel internally as a great fab tour and explanation of the processes! Two weeks after I first watched this video, I got an email on my work account linking back to this video 😂
Now that's fuckin awesome! Linus literally became a kind of Bill Nye for people in Intel. I mean he was already super popular but now, even the kids gonna know.
I really see why it took so long to get this video out, the amount of blurring needed to make sure all of the content was safe for intel to put out was far more than I expected. It was super cool to see how crazy high tech the fab was as well, it looked exactly like what I imagined a futuristic manufacturing facility would look like.
Them (intel) blurring that stuff was a bit silly and over blown. It’s not as if AMD or Samsung doesn’t already know what machines they use or who made them. I mean their is only one company that makes all the equipment anyway. Plus they all use the same processes and probably all have spy’s in each other’s companies lol
To quote Andrej Karpathy: "I don’t think a regular person appreciates how insane it is that computers work. I propose we stare at each other mind-blown for about 1 hour/day, in small groups in circles around a chip on a pedestal, appreciating that we can coerce physics to process information like that."
In general it's amazing what humanity can accomplish. We have small ultra powerful chips, we have fast LCDs, cameras, motion sensors... we can combine them to make a headset that lets you dive into virtual worlds. Sometimes i just have to stop and actually take it in... because it seems so impossible.
I mean it's not that impressive when you study them for a week or two. The digital transistor was the real breakthrough, but everything else has been incremental advances for the past 50 years relatively speaking
Linus: You can't even touch the machines because they're so precise. Also Linus: Let me keep tapping on these machines while I show you what's inside 🤣
Linus: "we cannot touch anything in here in fear of bumping anything and causing errors on the nanometer level" also Linus: *flails hands around within a foot of said delicate machinery*
Intel: Don't touch the machines, even the slightest tap could destroy a whole production. Linus: Walks in between machines and starts flapping his arms around furiously.
"Intel actually built their own concrete production in the corner of the lot" Dream site lol the level of productivity across the whole fab is really something to behold
I wouldn't be surprised, knowing Intel's "copy exactly" mantra, that they actually have a specific formula for concrete and specific production designs they use on every fab.
@@SuperSmashDolls usually they have special formula for their needs. like when you are building the base for nuclear reactor you need such special mix that whole science team is there to do ongoing tests of consistency every couple of loads
@@MarioDarnadi What’s cool is 150 years ago when there was no nuclear power or GPS, people were the same as today (and we had a lot of the math used in such state-of-the-art engineering in it’s infancy) we do indeed stand on the shoulders on giants - but the real pride of our times are the giants who keep building upon the ever growing knowledge.
I will never stop being astonished about Linus's curiosity and his ability to translate complex processes and systems to the understanding of everyone while keeping the experience cool as a cucumber.
I work at Texas Instruments, who's main business is actually analog microchip manufacturing, not calculators, and can tell you this video is pretty surprising to see. Everything is super accurate, and the fact that they let him in is incredibly surprising. Loved this video!
I worked in a Texas instruments Fab before my Air Force days and even to this day I'm still amazed at the process's it takes to build these chips. I'm surprised myself they let him in.
So is TI increasing their manufacturing facilities and where are they? Are they the chip manufacturers for the Auto manufacturers? And which companies?
@Robert Lee For want of being sued for all I'm worth, I can only confidently answer that yeah we're making a good few new fully automated fabs that will drastically increase our output capabilities, and yes some of the chips we make are used in things like car electronics. I've no idea what specific info is under NDA and I'm still working for them so thats about all I can give without doing my legal research lol
@@robertlee8805 TI also makes the imaging devices used in 9 out of 10 projectors worldwide. These devices are known under the trademark DLP (digital light processing).
I used to work for a company manufacturing mass spectroscopy and liquid/gas chromatography equipment and this video brought back some memories for sure, lol. Most of the facility was open-air manufacturing (parts assembly, QC, etc.), we had specialized suits for areas with extremely harsh acids (HF, HNO3, and HSO3F+SbF5) and extremely toxic chemicals (TMAH). One stage of manufacturing for a particular product (can't say) was especially interesting. It was built inside of an anechoic chamber and completely evacuated of air. Why? Because it was believed that even the TINIEST vibration of air created by sounds from the equipment motors would disturb the product. All in all, this was super cool to see. Great job Linus & Crew
The stuff they work with is far nastier - arsine, diborane, phosphine, and such for implantation, as well as fun etchants, though mostly dilute HF and piranha. Imagine a 10l cylinder full of phosphine sitting next to you. That's a nightmare on its own, even if it's not leaking...
Linus: "They only build their fabs in particularly stable parts of the world" Meanwhile at TSMC: Builds 9 fabs on an island with 2200 earthquakes per year
@@manny7886 i dont think their HQ is a chip fab building.. i dont think NBCUniversal is filming or editing anything in manhattan despite being headquartered there
Israel is also not seismicly stable. The Jordain river runs along the fault line between the African and Arabian techtonic plates. Although, Intel's primary Israeli office is in Kiryat Gat which is far from any fault lines. This fab however, isn't. Edit: my mistake. The fab is in Kiryat Gat. It's more than 50 km from the nearest fault line.
Always funny to return to this video and see how intently the workers watched him the entire time. They were super focused on not letting him accidentally cause any issues, and babysitting him the entire tour. lol Also, great video. Shows a lot for anyone who may/may not ever get to see one of these places in person.
Coming from a machinist and engineering background I can say that this has to be one of my favorite videos thus far, I’ve always loved your factory tours and manufacturing related things but that’s probably just the machinist in me talking.
They are really really really cool on the surface and to walk around in, but I went from being a machinist to a maintenance tech in a TI automotive chip fab and it was so ungodly boring. I worked on CVD tools and 90% of the PMs were just authorizing the tool to go down and clean itself. Opening a chamber for a wet clean was pretty cool though!
I feel really bad for the editors that had to go through every frame of this video to make sure they blurred everything potentially confidential without being too distracting.
I don't know what program they are using but can assure you it wasn't manual. Typically you use a automated program then go back and touch up the mistakes since it's never gonna be perfect.
Loved all that 50% of non blurred footage that I just saw. I can just imagine a room full of AMD guys analyzing this video on x0.25 speed to catch any bit of useful insight.
AMD spun off their fabs years ago, creating Global Foundries. AMD would have little to gain from watching this video. TSMC or Samsung, are a different story, and you can argue how helpful this would be to them.
I don't think that's how trade secrets work anymore, I believe Linus talked about that in a WAN show once, you can't just steal information at this scale and just use it, semiconductor manufacturing is highly specialized field and it's not like the engineers who work the stuff and know the processes never switch jobs but if it would come out, that there's someone going around telling secrets, that person would probably never work in tech again, if you're good at your job, the potential upsides from industrial espionage are miniscule in comparison to the PR disaster and probably international lawsuit that would follow. This kind of knowledge is not only protected by obscuring footage or secrecy but also by laws and thorough documentation on how e.g. a manufacturing process was developed, how it works, etc.
It really feels like magic because we don't know the steps it took to reach this point. Everything was made one step at a time, but we're seeing thousands of steps beyond basic intuition at this point, and we didn't even see the actual company secrets, here. Just imagine the tech we'll have in 5-20 years when everything is AI-optimized or whatever else is being added to completely change the way we even view tech.
Those machines costs a bit more than $40 million now. Showing a Nikon schematic was a bit of a laugh, all the high end stuff is on ASML EUV machines now.
As the building inspector at the Folsom Intel Campus, for many years, I can tell you I have seen some incredible things, most of which I will not divulge. But , trust me when I say the design and fabrication process is other worldly. I retired 17 years ago, and can't imanage the leaps in tech since I retired. I had to leave all communications devices at the front desk when I was inspecting, so I am impressed you got to film! Intel is one of our National Treasures. Thanks for the video!
@@wuspoppin6564 I'm in the process of commenting on your processor comment... but I cannot process it due to not having the right processor in my process... ... ... ... processor.
I am a video editor and colorist… and I appreciate all the work done on post-production. All those tracked blurs! And probably had to go through Intel’s approval to ensure nothing slipped. Kudos to your team! And Linus too :-)
@@on3mii trade secrets, same reason they wouldn't say anything about which chemicals they use, as TSMC, Samsung, and Global Foundries would love to have something like that be officially revealed via a press visit to the fab.
I wish I knew about this sooner.. I work in Intel in Fab 14 in Ireland (we do the electroplating that you did not get to see in israel) and would have loved to see if I could get Linus to come and have a tour☹️ we are also expanding (like israel) with a Fab 34 but i think overall it would be a great experience for Linus and the team… help him see this???
from what I know, the reason is that he also came to Haifa to see the R&D center there. Actually, most of his time here was in Haifa rather than Kiryat Gat.
Also, switching doesn't only involve buying new machines, but also developing new processes to ensure you can correctly build whatever you need to. And they probably need to re-design some parts of the CPU and validate everything along the way. On top of that, these tests probably take weeks if not months due to the amount of processing needed for each die.
Think of the things they had in the already built place, and now they double that with new more expensive stuff, Intel has money the cost for that is 100 millions easy.
Intel's 14nm fab was also an impressively good fab for what it was, and was arguably better than the 10nm fab that replaced it. 10nm has improved substantially since, but 14nm could still outperform it in terms of being able to reach very high clock speeds with low power consumption. 7nm ("Intel 4") is supposedly going to be a significantly better fab this time around. I think it will be a breakthrough for Intel and will help them better compete with the low-power consumption processors from their competitors. That being said, I do believe 14nm will likely remain in production for a while. As far as their "legacy fabs" are concerned, 14nm may go down in history as one of their best, and it's still very suitable for a lot of their lower-end or budget processors.
This makes me appreciate CPUs or any other smaller electronics much more. Not that I thought they were easy to make, but after watching this small fraction of the manufacturing process I think it's pretty amazing how a group of people are capable of making such things. Incredible.
Hey there! I actually work at GlobalFoundries and I'm super bummed out to hear they were ghosting you... ._. It's always amazing to see peoples minds blown when seeing my day-to-day work, especially as the latter is pretty normal and nothing special to me anymore at this point. :D I work in the "Backend of Line", so wafer bumping and specifically electroplating. I was glad to see my area of expertise mentioned, it is pretty niché even for a chip fab! Cheers to Intel Fab 28 for this amazing opportunity! 🍸
You were so lucky to get into the Intel fab and show us what goes on in there. You’ve got to be SO careful. One false move and the chips are RUINED! The best part of all this however are those FOUPs transporting those PRECIOUS silicon wafers safely from one step to another. Lovely!
@@Henry14arsenal2007 "Honestly its the first time he came off as completely idiotic and inappropriate." I know of a tried and tested method that could help. It's called "chill, dude". I didn't know your dialysis machine needs a new intel processor this urgent. ;)
@@theshawnmccown No, to be honest, if a machine has a precision of nanometers, any bump, even hard walking, can affect the whole process the machine is working on, that's how precise these are, and why only experts are allowed inside there.
It’s always crazy to see just how advanced our technology has become. Just touching the machines throws them off, taking off molecules or even atoms at a time, taking into account air pressure, air composition, lighting spectra, it’s crazy to see just how hard it is to make what most first world cultures take for granted
This is fabulous, and it's a testament to Linus's stature as a RUclips Influencer that Intel agreed to give him this tour. His genuine excitement and enthusiasm, as always, shine through. I was grateful to be taken along for the ride!
18:40 funnily enough, when we used to build houses out of bricks, it was very common to build a brick furnace on site, and use clay extracted from the future backyard and from the soil excavated to make space for the basement! Depending on your exact location and the quality of the clay, you'd get higher or lower quality bricks, which is why some bricks are just thrown away in demo, while others are reclaimed.
I am actually surprised they allowed you to tour this beautiful facility. good on you for visiting the holy land. one of these days i'll visit hopefully.
Not magical, just mostly secret. I'm sure it would make more sense if we knew what was actually going on (and had a physics/chemistry/engineering degree ;)
Some things I wish this video would bring across is the sheer incomprehensibility of the scale of these fabs. I've been in the intel Ireland fab and the strangest experience I will probably ever have is not being able to see the end of a corridor because of how far away it is. Also if anyone noticed people in orange suits or them hanging up in the back those are "copper only" suits. When wearing one you are able to go to copper only areas. Because of how small the elements are even a few atoms of copper can destroy an entire die. So people need to wear specific clothing to identify themselves as possibly copper contaminated so people in non copper smocks can avoid them in the fab! Love the video and happy that after 11 or so years you finally got to cross this off your bucket list!
Even though they're not going to share their specific secrets, that's awesome that they still let you in to look around and get some basics out of the tour. They use their space wisely!
I work at Intel in AZ. Fab12,32&42. I literally laughed out loud when he talked about how normally there are people at each and every work station at the tools. Lol nahhh. I love seeing my toolsets in videos like this. Funny how I can see so much behind the scenes of this video just because I see it everyday.
Having worked at a semiconductor mfg company before, I'm actually happy to even understand and be familiar with what's going on, what some of the machines do, and the stages of processing they undergo. I can also picture how much trouble Linus and team had to go through even before stepping foot into that facility.
Fab and final test equipment maintenance tech for 27 years, worked for Intel, IDT...Maxim Integrated...HitachiGST. Wish you would have shown the coolest part of the vacuum tools, the mech pumps ( Blowers) and the turbos used to pump down the vacuum and transfer chambers on most of vacuum tools...awesome to watch and hear them fire up. Venting the chambers to work on them, and pumping them back down...is the most time consuming aspect of working on them. That unique pumping sound you heard in the Chem cabinet was a peristaltic pump, probably feeding chemicals to one of the scrubber tools next to one of the CMP tools. Everything inside the CMP tools is wet, sometimes went through 2 or 3 bunny suits a shift working inside the tools. It was fun seeing wafers go from tiny tea cup size to turkey serving tray size ( 6 and 8 inch were the most common for my tools, until going to Intel )
Props to Intel for this visit. I know everyone is bagging a lot on them - and justifiably so at times, but they have a lot of cool people there. When I was a kid I wanted to write an essay about CPUs so I called them (this was before email) and asked for information and they delivered a huge box with manuals, models, posters and stuff to my home (also at a time when home delivery didn't exist where I live). I will always have a soft spot for them for doing all that for a nerdy kid.
That's such a cool story. The people that make up these companies are really awesome
thats insane, love it.
Wait a second, why does it say "employment contract" on the delivery note?!
@@user-nu5ib2ri9o I mean I wouldn't mind that.
That’s so cool!!
After watching this I still don't understand how CPU's are made and am going to continue to believe that its just magic
Yeah at least we all understand a little bit more now.... i have definately learned something from this video....
@@robkelly9258 I learned that its god damnnnnnn expensive
Yep.
I knew i wouldn't understand, but understand it better knowing that there are hundreds if not thousands of different processes that build the layers or "circuitry "
@@obsidianflight8065 I kinda understand now why these chips are getting more and more expensive :/
Basically, a CPU is a rock that we managed to trick into thinking. So... yeah, magic.
I was so nervous seeing you wave your hands next to everything. Thanks for sharing, this was great. Shout out to the editors for the time it took to blur so much.
same, i was cringing that he is gonna bump somrthing
The place was secret. As such, the raw video never left the facility not blurred. Some Intel individuals had to comb over everything prior to giving Linus’ team footage.
haha
I was just about to type the same. Linus saying: "Because taking a machine like this offline for more than a few minutes at a time - very very costly" while violently waving his hands around was nerve wrecking.
@Henry thats not the secret
My daughter works as a maintenance tech at an intel fab in Portland, OR. She absolutely refuses to tell us anything about what she does other than "I fix machines". She sent me the link to this video as "this is the best I can do of at least showing you what it looks like where I work, they explain more than I'm allowed to say.". I'm glad to get at least some picture!
Yeah those NDA's are no joke
@@devanshudwivedi5875 Definitive! The clauses in the contracts contain extremely high fines. What is estimated there, will not be paid to you in your whole life.
@@Alex-us3pz And you get banned from all intel sites worldwide. So good luck finding work!
@@scottbrunson2460 Holy smoke you are right! In the end, it doesn't matter. Your life is f****ed up when you cheat on Intel.
@@scottbrunson2460 and no other company would hire them either.. Because they too have secrets they want to protect..
I like how Linus is wildly waving his arms around as he talks about how you can’t bump the machines
Because he's a pro arm waver.
You can see him bump few things lol
That was so anxious to watch, imagine the intel guys there watching lol
Most of the machines weren't in-process so it's probably fine but yeah still probably made the Intel people sweat a bit.
He touched one at 11:22
Intel: "Don't even touch our fab machines."
Also Intel: *invites Linus "Butterfingers" Sebastian into their factory*
yeahs butterfingers and AMD Laptop under his arms
Watching Linus wave his hands around during this video made me so nervous (especially after the previous video I watched was him dropping a $5000 laser projector).
Now I'm definitely clumsy myself, but I feel like Linus is way more confident in his own dexterity and coordination than he should be. Especially with extremely expensive things!
@@shadesofmist9214 To be fair, AMD and Intel are pretty goody-buddy like outside of competing. All people in the same industry usually love either competition, or just the industry in general. Coming in the fab with AMD equipment would probably give them a laugh haha.
@@ZFilms11 im not against AMD or Intel anyway , but its funny to see and i want to mention.
@@shadesofmist9214 🤣🤣🤣
I am going to imagine that several percentage of CPUs made this day were made slightly more defective than otherwise thanks to a nearby Linus' wild gesticulations.
You just wanted an excuse to say gesticulations.
this might be unironically true lmfao
@@thunderxr2736 lmao
@@thunderxr2736 I'm sorry to tell you this but a country's legitimacy comes from the amount of guns that it has, not your feelings. And Israel has all the guns it needs to be legitimate right now.
@@thunderxr2736 rofl middle easten minecraft allah minkey XD
Linus: "They don't want me to literally touch any of the equipment"
Proceeds to pantomime within inches of the equipment
And then touches it ; )
He was giving me anxiety waving around next to the machines, he jokes about the buttons but if you push the right button at the right time that's a few hundred grand going *poof*, and a big pain in the ass for a lot of people. His handler should have been stricter.
He was pointing to something and drove his finger into the glass and pretended like we all didn't see it lmao
@@johns1625 hes linus tho he can do whatever
Linus always had a touching problem 😂
Never in a million years did I think I'd be watching this kind of content on RUclips. You have truly elevated the entire tech industry and helped democratize information for everyone. Thanks so much for everything you and everyone at LTT does.
How does saying public information and showing blurred machines "democratize" information?
Not in a million years?
@@mega_gamer93 there is no other video with this level of fab access anywhere
@@EpicWolverine Right but there's much more info about what goes on inside in research articles. Not nearly as entertaining, but if you're going to be doing anything with the information this video isn't going to be very helpful. Information is "democratized" in the form of public funding for research where the papers on it are public.
He sure does
great to see my babies (or their grandkids) still in use, i was part of the team to develop those overhead foup carriers for the launch of 300mm wafers back in the day. i was shocked on the amount of people there until i see the 1 thing you forgot to blur. a label on a foup stating the wafers are for testing only and not for sale. i'm guessing they were not running any production and were having a training/maintenance day. in 1 shot alone i seen more people than fabs i've been to had to fully staff the entire production facility.
Well, I'll guess they are recalibrating the machines for Gen 13 or even Gen 14. Gen 12 is factory wise already old tech, I would bet
Obviously they weren't going to just let Linus loose when they are actively producing chips.
Where was it?
Did you work at EFK on the original MHS system?
That's awesome!
It's really crazy how intricate they can make CPU's when over 50% of their factory is so foggy
Nah they just have crappy camera equipment ;]
wdym foggy everything looks clear to me
Haha all the blurred out parts of the video does make it look foggy. But they needed to protect those secrets.
@@__-tz6xx probably true, looks like blurring.
@@gregorychurch605 it was a joke. Of course he meant the secrecy blurring.
I'm an electrician that has done a lot of work installing those tools at Intel. Like you I was in complete awe going into the fab for the first time and seeing everything in there. But trust me, after a few weeks of having to put on the bunny suits and go through all the procedures to work in there every day, the novelty of it wears off pretty quick, lol.
What type of electrician are you?
@@Catb00i a very expensive one
@@RP944 🤣🤣
Which location? I used to run sparkies around Ocotillo, BD
The real heroes are the editing crew as they had to go through multiple revisions to get it approved for uploading.
What an amazing and informative video, never thought I would see such a magnificent facility
I'm semi convinced Intel would never let LTT do the blurring. My guess is that LTT cut everything together and had Intel censor it.
OMG I LOVE HEROES. THESE GUYS ARE SUCH HEROES!! LOOK, THEY PUT ON ROBES AND WENT INSIDE A BUILDING! I'M LITERALLY CUMMING IN MY PANTS
The raw footage might've been blurred first by Intel then editors worked on it.
Yes, the footage would have had to go through numerous security reviews before being published. A lot of these probably have been cut and scrubbed clean as they are not allowed to even show the equipment manufacturers and suppliers they use. Also, pretty sure they had lengthy paperwork and orientations even prior shooting.
@@RaiOkami why aren't they allowed to show any of that stuff? what's so secret about it?
Linus: "It's probably costing intel thousands of dollars to have us here."
Me: Now we can blame Linus for the chip shortage.
YES, Linus contaminates everything ...
To be honest it probably didn't cost that much. It's not like they shut anything down for him and it's not actually needed to to have the clean room as clean as it is because the wafers don't usually see fab air as they either travel around in foups or are inside the tools
@@eglandon16 he was referring to the fact that not as many people were at their stations in the area where he said it. He also said that they'd all be manned in normal conditions. That wasn't word for word what we said, but that's the jist of it.
@@craftedinsanity406 lol if you think those stations are ever all manned boy do I have a surprise for you. They are never manned unless we are actively working on a tool. For covid the technician numbers in the fab didn't go down, the only thing different were the engineering teams started working from home.
@@eglandon16 I found the part of the vid I was talking about: 10:07
The amount of small details this factory can form on silicon is outstanding.
Especially considering how blurry it is.
reminds me of some Japanese films 🧐
true
@@Oscar4u69 40% visible 60% up to your imagination. That's the beauty of it.
@@Oscar4u69 what? What are you watching that's so modern they blur? It's always been pixelated?
@@leovang3425 15:38
About a decade ago a guest MBA professor gave a lecture on the overall steps of making a CPU.. the room was full os engineers, business, finance, logistics people, etc.. I remember it very clearly.. the sheer complexity of it all absolutely blew everyone's mind.
Like a kid in a candy store. Loved this video, it's fascinating to see how it all comes together, and Linus looks so happy LOL
daddy linus dream complete
Ive wanted to see how it works but a 7 year old youtube video was the best thing before this video. This stuff is so fascinating to me.
twas boring.
As a commercial/industrial electrician doing these kind of projects is as exciting as is what they make. Imagine the time and craftsmanship that goes into that ;)
I'm Hex DEAD watching this.
It’s pretty clear your editing team had some serious hoops to go through on this video. Congrats to the team, I certainly appreciate it.
Probably had someone from intel with them constantly pointing out things to censor and cut, then had the video reviewed and changed hundreds of times by others to be 100% sure nothing ultra secret gets leaked
foups
@william_prlt They were likely given a temp office area to review and edit the footage in a supervised environment, then required to destroy the uncensored media prior to leaving.
My company allowed a media outlet in for a tour a few years ago and this was our procedure. We even rented camera equipment for them, so that the only thing they left with was an external hard drive with the edited footage.
@@adreiiaii510 That's what I had assumed they did in this case. There's too much at stake for Intel to risk any possibility of a leak.
Well I guess there is a reason this video was recorded last November and only just now released.. lot's of double checking one would think
Linus- "We can't touch ANYTHING!"
Also Linus- touches and aggressively gestures at everything for the rest of the video
Intel- *watches nervously*
Intel- We're in danger...
I was just waiting for him to error something out! Thought for sure the OHV was about to pick up a FOUP while he was waving his hand above it, not great to happen!
It's more irritating, and angering than anything.
@@TheRyujinLP From AMD and Apple.
It made my anxiety skyrocket.
honestly its hard to believe that we as humans went from using swords in battle to melting sand to make computers to process huge tasks, all within a century
I just want to give a shout-out to the editors of this video. The amount of blurred content you guys had to go through must have been insane. Great job on the final result and quality!
Said editors were prolly Intel tbh
Yup, no way intel would let that info out of the building
the credits (21:48) say that Dennis edited it, which seeing as he was also the shooter would probably have been fine with Intel.
@@bobthemagicmoose I guess thats why he was carrying the laptop
What about that shot-out to Guy lol. I'm still wondering if that's his real name or just some guy.
“The told me not to touch anything” proceeds to wave hands, body, laptop near all the equipment the rest of the video. I can’t imagine the level of stress those workers had when they find out Linus is extremely clumsy.
He said on the WAN show (I forget which episode but it was April 2022) that a ton of people in the fab knew who he was and wanted to get a picture or an autograph. He said it was a strange realization because he had so much admiration for them and their skill, yet they were so excited to meet him and were big fans lol. It was a cool story I recommend checking it out
He did say most of the staff around were maintenance crew, so maybe Intel let him around to not-poke-at-things when the fab was going through some kind of maintenance cycle?
@@ethanlenning reminds me of the story of Maximilian(big fan of Final Fantasy) meeting Square Enix dev team, and them being fans of his, even watching his reaction video to FF7 Remake reveal as inspiration.
@@Lanka0Kera I guess at the moment they maybe are,
1. they have to prepare for 13th and 14th gen chips
2. there is a building side next to their fab - I guess they will restart full production when that new part of Fab 28 is finished.
@@ethanlenning anyone else know which episode this was?
I work in semiconductors as a production tech and this video is absolutely amazing. It's so hard to tell people exactly what I do because I can't actually show them but this video shows everything I would want to show them. Explaining all the photolithography, etching, implanting, and even why we gown up top to bottom is kind of daunting and I'm glad Linus is able to explain it all in just a few slides. Thank you for making such an insightful video that I can show my friends and tell them what exactly I do 12 hours a night.
how long to break the nanometer barrier to an even smaller scale?
@@renatoigmed 10 nanometers are literally on the order of ~100 of atoms wide. You start getting down to that scale and you're beholden to more quantum mechanical effects than you're really wanting. I don't know much, condensed matter physics is not my field (I work in organic semiconductors for display technology), but the smaller it goes, the more you're going to get interrupted by the electron wavefunctions having some ability to just jump the potential gap.
Quantum mechanics, in it's probabilistic nature, means that going smaller than around ~5 nm is gonna be really hard without some novel innovations to exploit these effects or substantially suppress them. Mind, there are some insanely smart cookies working on this stuff, so I'll certainly be pleasantly surprised to see a chip that does it. But, you can only go so low.
"All past videos before December 2018 will have comments disabled."
Why?
@@CrazyPlayer-pf2hv because I no longer make content.
I wonder why various labels and signs on the machines need to be blurred in the video. What can be so proprietary on a sign?
Can you imagine the anxiety the staff had watching Linus walking around with the energy he had. I'm honestly surprised he got that far into the tour, with his arms flapping around the way they were.
lul
@@iikatinggangsengii2471 why does that translate like that lmao
Your explanation only made an even better case for the fact that : Yes, we did indeed use Magic (and Alchemy) to trick a rock into thinking for us
Yes :)
It's really mindblowing to think about how we, as a species, are capable of engineering things on the nanometer and sub-nanometer scale. Just absolutely wild
Was the answer 42?
This is the real magic of crystals. The amount of effort in just the silicon crystal growth, cutting, and polishing is wild.
This may be the best comment on a video I have seen in a good while
My mother worked for Intel for 20+ years and she was surprised that Linus was even let in to the facility. She was happy to see this and brought back memories from long ago when Intel manufactured chips here in the Philippines.
Do u. Get free cpu?
sana all
Yeah i worked there as an intern as well. wearing the same exact PPE sad that it closed tho.
@@aarons-6678 no
Why it has been stopped?
I’ve worked in the chip industry for nearly 15 years and studied semi-conductors in college. This is one of the best intro into how a fab operates I’ve ever seen. Really good job taking such a complex process and breaking it down into simple concepts.
Also the amount of blurring you had to do for confidentiality in hysterical to me.
I’m an engineer who works with semiconductors as well. This was phenomenal, I wish I had this when taking my VLSI class at college
I just retired after working 30 years at the Chrysler minivan plant. And they were strict in the paint shop area. But this stuff is on a level that is insane. Love it.
I got to tour the Hillsboro, OR Fab in December with Dr TechTechPotato himself. It was SO incredibly overwhelming, awesome, stupefying and wonderful. Hope you had the same experience!
hi craft computing
which floor did you check out?
@@jomama7210 D1X 🙂
@@CraftComputing was it big?
Worked in D1X for a little bit. The technology is amazing but working in these fabs gets super annoying after awhile.
My Dad worked at Fab3 in Silicon Valley in the early 80’s on the Pentium team. He holds the patent for the polishing process that’s used after deposition. Of course it’s been updated a ton since then, but he was the first to come up with those brush/slurry polishers. Feel free to reach out Linus if you want more info.
I’m no expert but I doubt even the patent holder can talk about said things because of Intel and contracts.
@@mr.inconspicuous6395 100% facts, I agree, no details can be given at all; that being said there’s plenty of room for conversation, especially as pertains to the technology that was definitely cutting edge in the 80’s but really just laid the groundwork for the tech we saw in the video. I guess I was just saying that if they wanted more background or to even see/discuss the OG patent (it is public info after all), that I could put LTT in touch with my pops.
@@mr.inconspicuous6395 edit: I lied, all the Intel specific stuff is still definitely under wraps, but he continued the work for some time at other companies and those patents are indeed public.
Fun fact: supposedly somewhere on the P3 chip there’s a nanoscale lithography of the names of the 150ish engineers that helped design the process and the chip. Haven’t ever gotten a chance to break one down and take it to a TEM but it’d be cool to get a pic of his name on the chip somehow some day.
@@daniellabunsky653 Confusing numbering as P5 was the first Pentium, P55 (5.5) was the Pentium MMX, and P6 was the Pentium II. Yet somehow I suspect P3 isn't the 386 shared (under contract) with second source chip makers.
@@daniellabunsky653 That's pretty cool. So I'm guessing your dad is wealthy af?
as a sysadmin, all I see in this factory is complete and utter ***STRESS*** - if any machine needs any single, simple step of maintenance or troubleshooting, I'd be sweating bullets, knowing just a minute of downtime could cost tens - hundreds of thousands of lost revenue.. That is crazy! Huge props to any team managing such a factory!
Having played Factorio, meh, just make sure you have a lot of machines that can do the same step, so instead of halting production, capacity decreases while it's down.
@@gunnargu exactly. Productivity decreases, thus causing tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
@@gunnargu Person A, Sysadmin. Person B, played Factorio. I think I know who to put more trust in.
Wanna know what's stressfull? Try having to design software or apply a patch in such an environment - you simply pray it works every time!
You do get used to it though ;-)
As an automation engineer doing the software upgrades on stuff like this, the best feeling is a download and nothing stoped working.
By no means am I a tech expert or I can pretend to understand even a quarter of what's going on here, I'm just a clinician but the enthusiasm and the energy you guys brought to this video is what professionals in a niche field love to see from their guests. It's a huge positive and motivating force. Well done!
Man, my heart was pumping hard seeing Linus walking through the facility, waving his arms and almost touching things. Linus would be the the reason for another chip shortage.
Your comment just made my day. Thank you!
people bump them all the time it is annoying but not world ending
I actually got quite anxious watching him show us him almost touching the machines whilst saying to NOT TOUCH THE MACHINES!
I kept gasping when his arms were getting very close to stuff.
😂😂😂😂
Linus: "You don't wanna ever bump these machines while they are running!"
Also Linus: *Talking aggressively in hand gestures next to the machine*
Yep, he is the absolute worst person to have inside a facility like that!! He is the proverbial "Bull in a China shop"!!
Israelis talk a lot with their hands...I would know, I am one.
I don't think anyone got nervous in the FAB while Linus was talking.
@@ilankutsman4965 well its Linus so i would be nervous
@@ilankutsman4965 11:22
hahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha
CPUs still seem so "extraterrestrial" to me, it's just mind boggling how small everything is.
I also can’t comprehend the detail, they “dust off” a few atoms… ATOMS ⚛️
have you tried working with cells? those things are literally alive and you can only really see them with a microscope.
Demonic power. We are unchaining the anti-Christ.
It's really simple, they're just rocks we trapped lightning in and then tricked them into thinking.
@@jonathanodude6660 Yeah but they're also not a product of human manufacturing lmao
Years ago I was a vendor to a US company that made the chip carriers for Intel. As a senior applications engineer, I was asked to write a CNC routing program that created a precision pocket within the chip carrier for the chip to be imbedded. The equipment was a single spindle vision assisted machine called a "SMART Router". I used a 0.032" router bit to cut the pocket. The tolerance for the routing was +50 microns, -0 microns. Any negative error would destroy the carrier by damaging the gold traces inside the carrier. The router bit would wear in a predictable way so the software could adjust the cutter path on the fly to ensure consistent dimensioning. Otherwise, as the router bit would wear, its diameter would shrink causing the part to fall out of tolerance. There were special .020" pads (fiducials) inside the chip carrier that the vision system would locate and then correct the path of the cutter. There was one room with about 30 of these SMART Routers.
It took YEARS for Intel to deliberate and finally decide to allow the living Dropper inside their factory that's allergic to drops, tremors, and vibrations.
I want to like your comments but it's on 69 likes, so, nice
what are you taking about
@@jamesjohnXII Linus is known for his affinity to drop very expensive stuff :)
@@ivogada thanks
if there would be a symbolic "Stone of Dropping" most people would say "touch it and you will drop items"... some few _wise_ people would say "this stone touched Linus" ;)
I know people like to crap on Intel and AMD, but this really shows how complex and expensive CPU manufacturing is. Honestly, it's bonkers that you can even get a base CPU for $150. It also shows how vulnerable we are as a society. There are very few of these plants around the world...effectively powering our entire modern world.
Yes, exactly. $40 Billion for a process? I don't even want to look at the C.E.O's financial books. To find an investor to bankroll these chips? I'm sorry, you're gonna need more than one. I imagine that whole building costs Trillions over the course of a decade just to build multiple chips at a time. I knew chips making was going to be complicated and expensive... but this video takes that scale to 100.
@@CarlosXPhone Economy of scale my friend.
Economy of scale my friend.
Also, those 150$ chips are defects of more expensive chips.
So, what would happen if Iran knocks out this factory ? AMD shares suddenly go up astronomically ? This could actually be a good business plan :>>
@@aleksazunjic9672 if that happen probably iran also got some damage too in their internet structure. AMD maybe cannot supply all cpu for whole world. that just worst decision to attck this factory lol but IF that literally happen then maybe we as regular costumer gonna fuckep up lol, just look at 2021, just a virus already make gpu prices high af now imagine if war happen
Would love to see the correlation between the failure rate and Linus’ proximity to those units. Mapped out as a overhead view as a path of destruction through the city.
Next time they gonna send Linus all chips that were into that particular day and when Linus complains they will just send him an email telling it 🤣
probably that day the yield rate gone down to I3's and got a Linus inside sticker on the packaging
Best comment.
Linus: You cannot touch *anything*
Also Linus: 11:41 *boops window*
He costed 3 months worth of work to be ruined
@@Kaiyats hope he didn't drop any copper ions in there!
This makes CPUs seem really good value. The amount of time and resources that go into them. The most precise engineering in the world. Absolutely insane.
To be fair, it's hundreds of dollars for mere grams of silicon.
@@lauej And yet it seems pretty fairly priced
What you said! Plus, assuming you bought the correct CPU for your needs, you usually end up using them for multiple years anyway so you totally get your money's worth.
@@lauej If they didn't have the volume in production the price per chip would be a lot more money. That's why they run flat out 24/7 364. Volume keeps the price of R&D down by percentage.
OTOH, this should make you realize that the common folk is a bad estimator of true resource investment from the OEM, hilariously bad actually (diamonds, NFTs…) and that value is perceived.
This should make us grateful and also fierce defenders of genuine competition, if the only fab in the world was this one and Intel had a monopoly, you’d never think anyone could do it better or cheaper.
You'll be pleased to know that this video is now being shared around Intel internally as a great fab tour and explanation of the processes! Two weeks after I first watched this video, I got an email on my work account linking back to this video 😂
So much better than the old Conan video lol that thing was terrible
Now that's fuckin awesome! Linus literally became a kind of Bill Nye for people in Intel. I mean he was already super popular but now, even the kids gonna know.
Having just had my fab tour today, this video doesnt do the size of the fab justice lol
thats gay
Dude how do i get to work in an Intel fab?
I really see why it took so long to get this video out, the amount of blurring needed to make sure all of the content was safe for intel to put out was far more than I expected. It was super cool to see how crazy high tech the fab was as well, it looked exactly like what I imagined a futuristic manufacturing facility would look like.
Alot of the blurred out items are tool names
they blurred the flathead screwdriver, lol
The poor editors.
I bet they still worry that some Chinese guy working at SMIC might watch this, and probably learn something valuable to advance the SMIC fabs. 😂
Them (intel) blurring that stuff was a bit silly and over blown. It’s not as if AMD or Samsung doesn’t already know what machines they use or who made them. I mean their is only one company that makes all the equipment anyway.
Plus they all use the same processes and probably all have spy’s in each other’s companies lol
I worked at Intel Fab 34 in Dublin as a surveyor. I marked the location of the machines in +-1mm accuracy.
To quote Andrej Karpathy: "I don’t think a regular person appreciates how insane it is that computers work. I propose we stare at each other mind-blown for about 1 hour/day, in small groups in circles around a chip on a pedestal, appreciating that we can coerce physics to process information like that."
💖 Isn't that the truth.
In general it's amazing what humanity can accomplish. We have small ultra powerful chips, we have fast LCDs, cameras, motion sensors... we can combine them to make a headset that lets you dive into virtual worlds.
Sometimes i just have to stop and actually take it in... because it seems so impossible.
We literally taught rocks to think.
I mean it's not that impressive when you study them for a week or two. The digital transistor was the real breakthrough, but everything else has been incremental advances for the past 50 years relatively speaking
We literally made a stone "think".
Insane :O That's definitely lifegoal as RUclipsr. Very nice Video man!
Heyy derbauer.
not only as a youtuber
the flippin' legend himself. oh, the wonders of the internet. hiiii
Frag doch mal bei Zeiss SMT in Oberkochen nach die Stelle z.B. die EUVL Innereien und die Lithographie Objektive für ASML in den Niederlanden her.
Hey Roman
Linus: You can't even touch the machines because they're so precise.
Also Linus: Let me keep tapping on these machines while I show you what's inside 🤣
Wonder how much he cost them lol 🤣
Yeah serious flailing and waving around going on. I Was scared the whole time
You would almost think he has a little Red Shirt Jeff with him...
Linus forced the next chip shortage. Intel now has to recalibrate all the machines after Linus went in.
@@boxdog54 Perhaps 100k to 300k us. It might have been more but they were clearly taking the opportunity to do maintenance.
Linus: "we cannot touch anything in here in fear of bumping anything and causing errors on the nanometer level"
also Linus: *flails hands around within a foot of said delicate machinery*
I flashed back to a compilation videos of Linus Dropping stuff 🤣
@@Diego2k5009 this is a bit more dangerous now just a slight bit
@@BrainScramblies Linus just killed hundreds of what could've been CPUs. /s
He wad not flailing his hands, he was doing ads in rapid sign language...
Linus literally was triggering my anxiety
Intel: Don't touch the machines, even the slightest tap could destroy a whole production.
Linus: Walks in between machines and starts flapping his arms around furiously.
That made this video incredibly tense 😅
that's what I was thinking ...
Jesus christ right? My anxiety was going nuts by proxy.
Intel- these are the cpu's we make that only yourubers and streamers can get but claim anyone can buy them
And he failed at 11:20
"Intel actually built their own concrete production in the corner of the lot"
Dream site lol the level of productivity across the whole fab is really something to behold
On larger projects this is the norm. Its much cheaper than running trucks non stop.
I wouldn't be surprised, knowing Intel's "copy exactly" mantra, that they actually have a specific formula for concrete and specific production designs they use on every fab.
thats normal
@@SuperSmashDolls usually they have special formula for their needs. like when you are building the base for nuclear reactor you need such special mix that whole science team is there to do ongoing tests of consistency every couple of loads
@@MarioDarnadi What’s cool is 150 years ago when there was no nuclear power or GPS, people were the same as today (and we had a lot of the math used in such state-of-the-art engineering in it’s infancy) we do indeed stand on the shoulders on giants - but the real pride of our times are the giants who keep building upon the ever growing knowledge.
So many potential core i9s turned into i7s thanks to Linus pantomiming near the wafers :)
I will never stop being astonished about Linus's curiosity and his ability to translate complex processes and systems to the understanding of everyone while keeping the experience cool as a cucumber.
I work at Texas Instruments, who's main business is actually analog microchip manufacturing, not calculators, and can tell you this video is pretty surprising to see. Everything is super accurate, and the fact that they let him in is incredibly surprising. Loved this video!
I worked in a Texas instruments Fab before my Air Force days and even to this day I'm still amazed at the process's it takes to build these chips. I'm surprised myself they let him in.
So is TI increasing their manufacturing facilities and where are they? Are they the chip manufacturers for the Auto manufacturers? And which companies?
@Robert Lee For want of being sued for all I'm worth, I can only confidently answer that yeah we're making a good few new fully automated fabs that will drastically increase our output capabilities, and yes some of the chips we make are used in things like car electronics. I've no idea what specific info is under NDA and I'm still working for them so thats about all I can give without doing my legal research lol
@@robertlee8805 TI also makes the imaging devices used in 9 out of 10 projectors worldwide. These devices are known under the trademark DLP (digital light processing).
I work at TI on the pump side but get to experience the fab all the time
I used to work for a company manufacturing mass spectroscopy and liquid/gas chromatography equipment and this video brought back some memories for sure, lol.
Most of the facility was open-air manufacturing (parts assembly, QC, etc.), we had specialized suits for areas with extremely harsh acids (HF, HNO3, and HSO3F+SbF5) and extremely toxic chemicals (TMAH). One stage of manufacturing for a particular product (can't say) was especially interesting. It was built inside of an anechoic chamber and completely evacuated of air. Why? Because it was believed that even the TINIEST vibration of air created by sounds from the equipment motors would disturb the product.
All in all, this was super cool to see. Great job Linus & Crew
wow thanks for the info, very interesting
Playing hide and seek with interviewer.
they must have learned it in the army
The stuff they work with is far nastier - arsine, diborane, phosphine, and such for implantation, as well as fun etchants, though mostly dilute HF and piranha.
Imagine a 10l cylinder full of phosphine sitting next to you. That's a nightmare on its own, even if it's not leaking...
I knew that CPU were complex to make but I had no idea they were THIS complicated to make! Talk about an amazing video.
You gotta do a lot to trick a rock into thinking lol
Linus: "They only build their fabs in particularly stable parts of the world"
Meanwhile at TSMC: Builds 9 fabs on an island with 2200 earthquakes per year
Intel headquarter is in Santa Clara, CA. Think of San Andreas's fault.
for real? how is that costing them? arent they the biggest fab manufacturer rn?
@@manny7886 i dont think their HQ is a chip fab building.. i dont think NBCUniversal is filming or editing anything in manhattan despite being headquartered there
Israel is also not seismicly stable. The Jordain river runs along the fault line between the African and Arabian techtonic plates. Although, Intel's primary Israeli office is in Kiryat Gat which is far from any fault lines. This fab however, isn't.
Edit: my mistake. The fab is in Kiryat Gat. It's more than 50 km from the nearest fault line.
@@Syed-wj4pj they build their fabs with dampers and such so their buildings are stable.
I Appreciate intel for letting Linus do this tour I always find cutting edge manufacturing interesting
Intel: we are taking single atoms precisely out of these wafers
overclockers: here's a sandpaper I'm going to use to lap this die
You´re killing me here mate xD
we're basically all monkeys staring at monoliths when it comes to CPUs they're so damn complex its hard to believe they're real
@@ummmhelp AIs, that is, other processors, help design modern processors, so in reality, nobody actually understands how they're made.
Engineers die inside
@@tylerchambers6246 except the people that made the first one
Always funny to return to this video and see how intently the workers watched him the entire time. They were super focused on not letting him accidentally cause any issues, and babysitting him the entire tour. lol
Also, great video. Shows a lot for anyone who may/may not ever get to see one of these places in person.
Of course.
Its a super secretive business and where toptier tech are being made.
Coming from a machinist and engineering background I can say that this has to be one of my favorite videos thus far, I’ve always loved your factory tours and manufacturing related things but that’s probably just the machinist in me talking.
They are really really really cool on the surface and to walk around in, but I went from being a machinist to a maintenance tech in a TI automotive chip fab and it was so ungodly boring. I worked on CVD tools and 90% of the PMs were just authorizing the tool to go down and clean itself.
Opening a chamber for a wet clean was pretty cool though!
Telling someone about the sponsor is also on my bucket list.
thanks, mom and dad
It would be nice and cool
Israel is an apartheid state
@@thunderxr2736 fucking seriously 😑
I feel really bad for the editors that had to go through every frame of this video to make sure they blurred everything potentially confidential without being too distracting.
Probably Dennis.
@@Mediaright nah, probably someone at intel
I don't know what program they are using but can assure you it wasn't manual. Typically you use a automated program then go back and touch up the mistakes since it's never gonna be perfect.
@@TurkeyOW It's definitely manual. Most likely tracked in After Effects.
also the sponsorships lol
That moment when you use LTT video to confirm the configuration on a toolset on the other side of the world. Thank you LTT 😊
Hahahahahah this is amazing!
Loved all that 50% of non blurred footage that I just saw. I can just imagine a room full of AMD guys analyzing this video on x0.25 speed to catch any bit of useful insight.
AMD doesn't have fabs, so there's not much for them to analyse.
AMD spun off their fabs years ago, creating Global Foundries. AMD would have little to gain from watching this video.
TSMC or Samsung, are a different story, and you can argue how helpful this would be to them.
No. Its China's state-owned SMIC foundry will benefit the most .
Why would AMD care?
Their CPUs are on par, if not better fir gaming.
Such a Intel bias comment
I don't think that's how trade secrets work anymore, I believe Linus talked about that in a WAN show once, you can't just steal information at this scale and just use it, semiconductor manufacturing is highly specialized field and it's not like the engineers who work the stuff and know the processes never switch jobs but if it would come out, that there's someone going around telling secrets, that person would probably never work in tech again, if you're good at your job, the potential upsides from industrial espionage are miniscule in comparison to the PR disaster and probably international lawsuit that would follow.
This kind of knowledge is not only protected by obscuring footage or secrecy but also by laws and thorough documentation on how e.g. a manufacturing process was developed, how it works, etc.
Really blows my mind that people could figure out how to make stuff like this.
Smart people and time. This is centuries of tech evolution.
This is decades of evolving technology
It really feels like magic because we don't know the steps it took to reach this point. Everything was made one step at a time, but we're seeing thousands of steps beyond basic intuition at this point, and we didn't even see the actual company secrets, here. Just imagine the tech we'll have in 5-20 years when everything is AI-optimized or whatever else is being added to completely change the way we even view tech.
Yeah bro, I feel you
@@troloosauhund8747 That just makes it more incredible
Now you have to go to ASML's factory in the Netherlands to see how those $40 million machines are made.
You _have_ to.
The newest ASML EUV’s are actually >$150 million, wild stuff
I think he would love to, but ASML has the last word about that
that would be insane dude, i want it to happen ahahahahah
Those machines costs a bit more than $40 million now. Showing a Nikon schematic was a bit of a laugh, all the high end stuff is on ASML EUV machines now.
Or go to Lam Research facility in Tualatin OR.
As the building inspector at the Folsom Intel Campus, for many years, I can tell you I have seen some incredible things, most of which I will not divulge. But , trust me when I say the design and fabrication process is other worldly. I retired 17 years ago, and can't imanage the leaps in tech since I retired. I had to leave all communications devices at the front desk when I was inspecting, so I am impressed you got to film! Intel is one of our National Treasures. Thanks for the video!
You could say that this is Linus processing how processors are processed.
BOooooooooo!! Booo on you sir!!! Lol That was a top notch dad joke; that got a well earned groan.
And we're processing what his editors processed how he was processing how processors were being processed
@@wuspoppin6564 I'm in the process of commenting on your processor comment... but I cannot process it due to not having the right processor in my process... ... ... ... processor.
@@CharlesHepburn2 processing processor something something processor
Sorry can’t process this comment, maybe try to overclock the process.
I am a video editor and colorist… and I appreciate all the work done on post-production. All those tracked blurs! And probably had to go through Intel’s approval to ensure nothing slipped. Kudos to your team! And Linus too :-)
I am guessing the footage never left the building until it was censored by Intel themselves. The uncensored original never did.
Kudos, but I am also sure it was a requirement to be let in the facility.😀
@@jorgemt62 why did they have to blur so much
@@on3mii trade secrets, same reason they wouldn't say anything about which chemicals they use, as TSMC, Samsung, and Global Foundries would love to have something like that be officially revealed via a press visit to the fab.
@@on3mii Confidental stuff.
"Don't touch anything." These are people who understand the reputation Linus has for dropping things and knocking them over.
😅😅😅😂😂🤣
At 11:20 he slaps a hand on the dry etch machine loool
Her de dur. What a crap, unoriginal comment....
Most people don't know this, but @2:00 Linus did not throw that piece, he dropped it upwards.
I wish I knew about this sooner.. I work in Intel in Fab 14 in Ireland (we do the electroplating that you did not get to see in israel) and would have loved to see if I could get Linus to come and have a tour☹️ we are also expanding (like israel) with a Fab 34 but i think overall it would be a great experience for Linus and the team… help him see this???
Try him on Twitter or email
Send him an email! Also try his twitter.
from what I know, the reason is that he also came to Haifa to see the R&D center there. Actually, most of his time here was in Haifa rather than Kiryat Gat.
@@TheStrategyStudio268 i dnt have twittee but ill email!
@@gabiferreira6864 ill email him, thanks so much! Would you know where i can find his email??
I'm beginning to appreciate why switching to a different nanometer process would be prohibitively expensive even for a tech giant
For sure man, and you can bet that they've already planned for generations ahead but yeah, big changes = big $$$
Also, switching doesn't only involve buying new machines, but also developing new processes to ensure you can correctly build whatever you need to. And they probably need to re-design some parts of the CPU and validate everything along the way. On top of that, these tests probably take weeks if not months due to the amount of processing needed for each die.
Think of the things they had in the already built place, and now they double that with new more expensive stuff, Intel has money the cost for that is 100 millions easy.
@@dtiydr the moment when that generation becomes obsolete and so does the machines 💀
Intel's 14nm fab was also an impressively good fab for what it was, and was arguably better than the 10nm fab that replaced it. 10nm has improved substantially since, but 14nm could still outperform it in terms of being able to reach very high clock speeds with low power consumption.
7nm ("Intel 4") is supposedly going to be a significantly better fab this time around. I think it will be a breakthrough for Intel and will help them better compete with the low-power consumption processors from their competitors.
That being said, I do believe 14nm will likely remain in production for a while. As far as their "legacy fabs" are concerned, 14nm may go down in history as one of their best, and it's still very suitable for a lot of their lower-end or budget processors.
This makes me appreciate CPUs or any other smaller electronics much more. Not that I thought they were easy to make, but after watching this small fraction of the manufacturing process I think it's pretty amazing how a group of people are capable of making such things. Incredible.
Yeah, there's a talk from around a decade ago and they were already using "monolayers" as a unit. ruclips.net/video/NGFhc8R_uO4/видео.html
My son and I made this !! Thank You ! We both enjoyed making it.
The frame by frame attention to scrubbing this video of details that needed blurring is most impressive thing to me here. Props to the editor!
Even stuff in reflections were blurred.
I am guessing that intel was reviewing their footage before publishing it online
@@kingseekerbackup3085 They most likely reviewed the footage before even letting them exit the building
if you do your job correctly, you don't get sued or your video doesn't get pulled
@@houtamelocoding interesting. Never thought of that.
Hey there! I actually work at GlobalFoundries and I'm super bummed out to hear they were ghosting you... ._.
It's always amazing to see peoples minds blown when seeing my day-to-day work, especially as the latter is pretty normal and nothing special to me anymore at this point. :D
I work in the "Backend of Line", so wafer bumping and specifically electroplating. I was glad to see my area of expertise mentioned, it is pretty niché even for a chip fab!
Cheers to Intel Fab 28 for this amazing opportunity! 🍸
Help this man get a tour of your fab!
Now I understand why it takes so long to get one of these factories built.
You have to steal the land and then ethnically cleanse it of its inhabitants first.
And then when it's built, you need to find qualified and capable employees to run it, educating them is no small task either.
@@jubuttib I'd guess they usually just fly the workers on site if there's nobody.
@@w花b Do they have that many extra laying around? A whole fab's worth?
Well if in 3-5 months Intel reports yield issues again we know why 😉
You were so lucky to get into the Intel fab and show us what goes on in there. You’ve got to be SO careful. One false move and the chips are RUINED! The best part of all this however are those FOUPs transporting those PRECIOUS silicon wafers safely from one step to another. Lovely!
Linus: "You don't even want to bump these machines!"
Also Linus: aggressively articulates staying near the machine
His gesticulation were causing me actual anxiety.
When the next shift comes in they wonder why the whole building is laying on it's side.
Linus dropped it.
This, even more annoying watching it at 1.5. Honestly its the first time he came off as completely idiotic and inappropriate.
Gave me anxiety
@@Henry14arsenal2007 "Honestly its the first time he came off as completely idiotic and inappropriate."
I know of a tried and tested method that could help. It's called "chill, dude". I didn't know your dialysis machine needs a new intel processor this urgent. ;)
Linus: "You don't even want to bump these machines!"
Intel: "Who approved butterhands for a tour?"
Lol
They probably made that up for his tour, knowing his reputation. 😀
@@theshawnmccown No, to be honest, if a machine has a precision of nanometers, any bump, even hard walking, can affect the whole process the machine is working on, that's how precise these are, and why only experts are allowed inside there.
The machine made by ASML are really really god damn nobel level machines.
the guy who dropped a 15 tb harddrive
It’s always crazy to see just how advanced our technology has become. Just touching the machines throws them off, taking off molecules or even atoms at a time, taking into account air pressure, air composition, lighting spectra, it’s crazy to see just how hard it is to make what most first world cultures take for granted
wasn't there a video of single atom suspended in magnetic field?
Intel be like "what do u mean our technology it's MY technology that builts OUR technology".
These machines are making what we call our technology
It's crazy how far we've taken sand paintings. Which is basically that a chip is. Lines drawn in sand.
This is fabulous, and it's a testament to Linus's stature as a RUclips Influencer that Intel agreed to give him this tour. His genuine excitement and enthusiasm, as always, shine through. I was grateful to be taken along for the ride!
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the shear amount of work that goes into blur masking this episode 🐑
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the shear amount of work that was put into making those processors
Rightly so
I, too, like to shear 🐑
sheer
Intel probably looked through the unfiltered video like this😱then started circling and highlighting half of the screen that Linus needed to blur.
Man, over the years this channel changed a lot and the content never disappoints. Keep up the great work LMG
@@thunderxr2736 what kind of robot is this
Holdon what the fuck. This comment came out before the video?
Edit: I just realised the video hasn't been reloaded but the comment has nm
@@thunderxr2736 keep crying about it
@@thunderxr2736 it is a country though
hola daft punk
18:40 funnily enough, when we used to build houses out of bricks, it was very common to build a brick furnace on site, and use clay extracted from the future backyard and from the soil excavated to make space for the basement! Depending on your exact location and the quality of the clay, you'd get higher or lower quality bricks, which is why some bricks are just thrown away in demo, while others are reclaimed.
I am actually surprised they allowed you to tour this beautiful facility. good on you for visiting the holy land. one of these days i'll visit hopefully.
I was an intern at Intel more than 10 years ago. Glad to see the stretches are still being done 😂
Even with Linus inside of Intel explaining every step of making a cpu, it’s still magical to me
Most of the process is literal magic. Like the magic of using UV light as a drill
Not magical, just mostly secret. I'm sure it would make more sense if we knew what was actually going on (and had a physics/chemistry/engineering degree ;)
“We shouldn’t touch anything in case of breaking the tiny building blocks” me waiting for Linus to drop something 😂
11:20
@@R.MaxumOff there's a ghost up inside of you?!?
@@thunderxr2736 Just stop. Take your political obsessions to another channel :)
@@thunderxr2736 bruh chill it’s a cpu factory tour video 😭
@@Tybearic 😂😂
What is Linus visiting the fab is the reason for all of the oxidation issues 2 years later xD
Man, I hope people recognize how huge it is to be let in to a fab like this. I am so happy for everyone at LTT.
Some things I wish this video would bring across is the sheer incomprehensibility of the scale of these fabs. I've been in the intel Ireland fab and the strangest experience I will probably ever have is not being able to see the end of a corridor because of how far away it is.
Also if anyone noticed people in orange suits or them hanging up in the back those are "copper only" suits. When wearing one you are able to go to copper only areas. Because of how small the elements are even a few atoms of copper can destroy an entire die. So people need to wear specific clothing to identify themselves as possibly copper contaminated so people in non copper smocks can avoid them in the fab!
Love the video and happy that after 11 or so years you finally got to cross this off your bucket list!
Even though they're not going to share their specific secrets, that's awesome that they still let you in to look around and get some basics out of the tour. They use their space wisely!
I work at Intel in AZ. Fab12,32&42. I literally laughed out loud when he talked about how normally there are people at each and every work station at the tools. Lol nahhh. I love seeing my toolsets in videos like this. Funny how I can see so much behind the scenes of this video just because I see it everyday.
At night theirs no one
Okay so it's magic. Just like I thought.
Cool video.
man props to companies that let media in on this shit, its so interesting but I also understand how difficult it can be.
Having worked at a semiconductor mfg company before, I'm actually happy to even understand and be familiar with what's going on, what some of the machines do, and the stages of processing they undergo. I can also picture how much trouble Linus and team had to go through even before stepping foot into that facility.
I feel like this is the closest we got to aperture labs in the real world
I know right !!!
Fab and final test equipment maintenance tech for 27 years, worked for Intel, IDT...Maxim Integrated...HitachiGST. Wish you would have shown the coolest part of the vacuum tools, the mech pumps ( Blowers) and the turbos used to pump down the vacuum and transfer chambers on most of vacuum tools...awesome to watch and hear them fire up. Venting the chambers to work on them, and pumping them back down...is the most time consuming aspect of working on them. That unique pumping sound you heard in the Chem cabinet was a peristaltic pump, probably feeding chemicals to one of the scrubber tools next to one of the CMP tools. Everything inside the CMP tools is wet, sometimes went through 2 or 3 bunny suits a shift working inside the tools. It was fun seeing wafers go from tiny tea cup size to turkey serving tray size ( 6 and 8 inch were the most common for my tools, until going to Intel )