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- Date:
- Friday , January 25, 2008
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Centaur Technology Tour in Pictures
Before VIA showed off their latest processor architecture this week, they gave us the "grand tour" of the Centaur offices in Texas. There is a lot more to this place than a bunch of engineers sitting around playing with their slide rules.
Once we left the data center and real world application lab, we went across the hall to another set of offices right off the main entrance.
If that looks like a set of big electric ovens to you, you would be exactly right. Not necessarily an Easy Bake, but something close. These are actually big incubation chambers that Centaur has had specially designed for their in-house testing facilities. There are four units. Each unit accepts a bank of processors and puts the heat to them while the CPUs are under load.
Here we are seeing the “cards” that have the processors mounted on them. The first picture above is the card outside of the oven, and you can clearly see the little heatsinks and sockets the card contains. In the last picture we see where that card is being inserted into one of the incubation chambers for burn-in. Processors are burned in anywhere from 5 to 40 hours depending on what tests are being run.
The two pictures in the middle show a newer and more advanced version of the “incubator card” that has TEC heating/cooling elements as well as a liquid cooling system built in.
Once Centaur has the CN dies back from fabrication and whenever Elizabeth Tillman needs a new CN die, she simply swivels her chair around and grabs one. I am not sure if there is a method to her madness, but closer inspection will show that the dies are identified by location on the wafer, and I think she was logging that. (Maybe one day she will make a big “[H]” for us and take a picture?)
After she grabs her CN die she loads it into an arm on the pictured Finetech machine that holds the die in place. The machine then positions the package under the die and this is where Elizabeth is put into action. Taking a look at the screens to her right she is manually lining up the wires on the die with the solder balls on the package. Once she gets all 1,577 solder balls and pins lined up (and yes, we did count them) she engages the machine to apply heat to the package and it melts the solder to the die “wires.” If you watch carefully during the process, you can see the solder hit its melting point and the processor die “sit down” onto the package.
Here we are seeing a naked CN package. See all 1,577 balls of solder I counted above? The CN is sitting to the right of an already packaged C7 processor. One part of the process that does not go on in this room is the sealant that goes around the edge of the die to further bond the die to the substrate. This way it does not get dislodged and no dirt gets between the two. And while it probably does not need to be mentioned, CN production processor fabrication would all be done in a cleanroom.
After getting sealed, the CN processors go to an automated testing machine. It is called a Seiko-Epson handler and we hear the refill cartridges are a total rip-off. This machine has a little robot inside that picks up the processors, drops them into a socket, and it runs a series of tests on the parts and bins them by certain specifications programmed into the machine. It however is not “speed-binning” parts but rather testing for shorts and other anomalies in the packaging process. Elizabeth was running this machine as well, basically testing her work. She proudly let us know that she was good for 203 out of the last 206 CN processors. I highly suspect the CN that Centaur let me leave the building with is one of those 3.
Speaking of speed-binning, that is what is going on with the test systems shown. Again we see the highly tweakable TEC/waterblock setups. These testing systems can vary the clock speed of the processor while running a specific payload while altering the front side bus, CPU clock ratio, all the while adjusting the voltage with temperature fluctuations thrown into boot. So this machine is able to qualify processors and determine what sort of yields VIA is getting out of their test wafers.
Before we were herded out of the lab, we snuck in a couple of pictures of CN processors that had been qualified through the “speed-binning” process. You can see the first bin passed at a little under 1.2v at 1.8GHz with a core temperature of 65c. The second racked passed at 1.2V as well, although not much more information was available on the sticky note.
And finally Richard Brown, VIA Technology VP of Marketing, showing us a new device that will be powered by the new CN processor as well as the Cloudbook and other devices behind him already powered by VIA C7 series processors.
The Bottom Line
Centaur is a small company of less than 100 folks stuck away in Central Texas happily designing, building, and testing their processors. No matter what lies ahead for the CN processor, you have to admire the hands on, no nonsense, low budget approach that Centaur is employing in the development of their products. Centaur has taken semiconductor design down off its pedestal and placed it where we can admire it in all its complexity. Which doesn’t seem all that complex after you have Elizabeth build you a CPU to take home with you. And would not seem that low budget if we had to pay all those millions of dollars for the equipment needed to do it.
Thanks go out to Glenn Henry, Richard Brown, CJ Holthaus, and Pat Meier-Johnson for their help and hospitality this week. It is not often we get to see a CPU being made, start-to-finish, all before lunchtime.
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