Microscopic view of an Intel i486

Addendum - The 486 came out in 1989 (which is what the copyright on the chip said!), while the 386 came out in 1985. Not sure how I goofed that up. Cheers to the viewers who pointed out the error :) - Consensus seems to be a diffusion barrier for the titanium, either TiW or TiN. I did see some tungsten in the EDS scans, but wasn't reliable enough to feel comfortable sharing. Might have been tungsten vias, or part of the TiW. Unclear! But we can probably say the titanium was for diffusion prevention. Thanks folks!

Every time I see how detailed and complicated chips are I am reminded how incredibly smart the people who figured out how to manufacture them are.

Around the time the 486 was being manufactured I worked at Intel in the memory components division in the yield analysis group. I worked in the area where we analyzed the electrical signatures of the failures. But I worked closely with the technicians that did the physical analysis. They had to be able to peel back the layers to see underneath to find and identify what the yield limiters were. They had a recipe book full of chemical methods to strip off the multiple layers that the chips were built upon. One recipe to strip off the passivation, another to strip off aluminum. Etc. It was pretty common back then to have a dip in yields that needed to be fixed quickly. Samples of the memory chips would have their failures cataloged. There were many cases where the particles that were contaminating the chip were analyzed in detail. Once a particle was found in the Scanning Electron Microscope, it would be bombarded with the electron beam. The SEM had a mass spectrometer attached that picked up the elements of the contaminate that was knocked loose by the electron beam. They would look at the mass signature of the particles and try to match it to a catalog of various materials in the factory. Sometimes they could tell right away what it was. Lots of carbon, lots of organics: Scotchbrite. Someone improperly cleaned a piece of equipment with a Scotchbrite pad. Other times it would be some new alloy they had not seen before. They would trace it to a hinge of a door in a wafer handler that was emitting particles every time it moved. The particles would land on the wafer and render the chip inoperable. It was an endless detective game.

Chip designer here, I am amazed by the amount of hand layout done in the late 80s to construct a processor. Today most of the functionality is automatically placed and routed with a ratsnest of wires going all over the place. This design is beautifully engineered and many thousand of man hours went into such a intricate layout.

This just feels so unreal. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how people came up with, and managed to achieve this. The scale is unfathomably small, and this is 30 years old! Had I not been sitting at a computer typing this, I wouldn't believe that this was even real. This is mind boggling to say the least

Tip: LCD screen. especially the colour ones. It's easy to magnify each pixel of one. But how do the layers really look like? the sections of the liquid crystal and the colour filters.

I find it mind-boggling that electronic circuits can be made on this scale.

What's more mind-blowing is the disposability of such effort and sophistication. No thought is given to the utter wonder, power and complexity of any modern device.

My first computer was a 486, purchased almost new for $1000 in 1996. I loved that thing. I bought memory for it at a computer show, opened it up, and installed it inside. I miss that machine.

Nice video. I am an IC Reverse Engineer and you actually almost succeeded with viewing the transistors. In fact, at 8:04 in your video, you can see the polysilicon gates (the visible tracks on the video) of the transistors inside some digital logic bloc. You can see around those tracks dots that are kind of outlining where the transistors' active areas are. Those dots are called contacts and they are tungsten vias linking source, drain and gate of the transistors to the upper interconnect layer. I can see some inverters and buffers there :-) Great job!!! I read my own comment and it sounds quite technical, sorry about that..

I am a layout engineer and I work on 3nm technology, pretty advance from this but It was so cool to watch those metal lines and vias placed, especially those titanium and aluminum contacts for source and drain!

When people think of exploration, they probably think of going somewhere like outer space. But sometimes the most amazing places to explore are the tiny landscapes and structures that are so often a mere arms length away from us, which we never even notice are there.

I had so many 486 chips and motherboards as a kid, but I never knew how unbelievably complex they were at the microscopic level. It gives me a whole new respect for chipset architects and engineers, a group of people I didn't know I could respect anymore than I already had.

Wow! Please, please do a series on the transistors over the years!

I was a night manager in Intel. They had the masks for these chips displayed on the walls. I used to sit and stare and try to follow the Lions. It was cool.

How on earth have I never found this channel? Amazing writing, pleasing voice, brimming with information, which is eloquently and intelligently conveyed, and the video length is just right to give information and kindle a yearning for information in me, which made me research this further. Keep up the good work. Thank you.

I work in CD-Sem for Intel currently. This is very interesting to see. It's pretty crazy to see what used to be state of the art vs what we see nowadays.

This is impressive. The fact this tiny structure was manufacturable 30 years ago means to me technology is way more advanced than I believed it was. Now, they're on a nanoscale level (7 to 14, and soon as low as 4), meaning everything you see there is actually between a hundredfold to a thousandfold smaller. So they can litterally put over 100 486 CPUs in the same space than a single 486 CPU. And that's not accounting for the 3rd dimension: add several 10s more layers, and you're in the 500-1000x density range. Awesome.

A trip down memory lane. My first PC was a 486SX. Many good memories of playing X-Wing Flight Simulator on that. Good Times!

I like how you explain all the features because it makes the video a lot more interesting when we are seeing the components up close. Makes it feel more magical