🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan5.151627.9623@bmers95.bnr.ca> khor@bnr.ca writes:
>|> 
>|> Perhaps they wouldn't give away the latest 486-66/DX2 but surely there 
>|> are old 286 wafers lying around somewhere..
>|> 
>I dunno what they do with the wafers, but they are unsightly.  Good dice
>are taken out to be assembled as IC's and the remaining bad dice scattered
>across the wafer are all inked anyway.
>
	Why, they adorn the walls of the offices of Intel employees, of    
course! :-)
	Actually, after the wafers leave the fabrication line, the backsides
are ground and they are goldplated.  So, any rejected wafers are usually sent
through some kind of reclaim line where all the gold is reclaimed.  Also, the
various layers on the wafers can be stripped off and the wafers can be reused
for various engineering and maintenance type work (not for products, of course).	Of course, a not insignificant percentage of these wafers end up at
the desks of the engineers and technicians.  There are a lot of old timers 
around that have wafers of every size that has been used for production, all
the way from 2 inch diameter to the current 8 inch standard.  I have also
seen 10 inch wafers which I believe are in pilot lines in some places if not
in actual production, and a 12 inch wafer that was the most mindboggling 
thing that I have ever seen.  (Picture attempting to grow a 75 angstrom thick
gate oxide with less than 5 angstroms variation across a 12 inch diameter
piece of silicon!).
	It is quite amazing how far this industry has come in barely 25 years.
The modern 3 million transistor microprocessor is quite possibly the pinnacle
of human technological achievement.


-- 
Sam Sivakumar		    |  Intel's very own lithography dude, 
ssivakum@ptdcs5.intel.com   |  Speakin' for himself, that's for sure!
PTD, Aloha, OR              |