4 ms·
The most amazing thing about this (and another tiny RFID chip that was on HN recently) is not that you can print them on wafers, but that you can cut up the waf
by rwmj 1y ago
The most amazing thing about this (and another tiny RFID chip that was on HN recently) is not that you can print them on wafers, but that you can cut up the wafers and handle these tiny dies. Imagine you manufactured sugar, but had to manipulate each sugar grain separately.
- dfox 1y agoIf you want the bare chips and not full assembled labels the usual packaging is uncut wafer and cutting out and handling the individual dies is your problem.
- addaon 1y ago> If you want the bare chips and not full assembled labels the usual packaging is uncut wafer and cutting out and handling the individual dies is your problem. This does not match my experience, although I imagine it's true in some parts of the industry. I've seen bare dice usually delivered as KGDs (known good dice -- tested at the individual level, not just the wafer level). These used to be shipped in waffle packs, but I've more recently seen blue tape used for delivery, and going straight into pick-and-place.
- riedel 1y agoI was in a project with MAN Roland and the university of Dresden at the same time and the most important thing is roll to roll printing. This actually works well if you do not need an external antenna. What was the holy grrail at the time was to print also the antennas, get a decent coupling and then actually also do item and not only batch level tracking of the packaging you would print. Particular Pharma was really interested in terms of anticounterfeiting at low cost.
- vlabakje90 1y agoIt thought it was an interesting analogy, so I looked up the size of a typical sugar crystal. It's between 450 and 600 microns. So these chips are 3 to 4 times smaller than that even.
- jolmg 1y agoChecks out with the picture in the article.
- UomoNeroNero 1y agoThis is the really interesting Thing!!!! And: how they can have different ROM content (code) for each chip
- colechristensen 1y agoHow big is the saw if you're cutting up 150 micron pieces of wafer?
- wildzzz 1y agoSometimes a diamond saw is used but modern processes use lasers to score the die and then the wafer carrier expands to break along the scores.
- ipdashc 1y agoI have always wondered how this works (along with wire bonding), especially in an economic way. Chips being cheap makes sense at the lithography / wafer level because sure, you can stamp out thousands of them at once. But once you need to dice them up, bond wires to them, and package them... how on earth do you do that so efficiently that each chip can be sold for fractions of a cent?
- faichai 1y agoIf you can shine lasers at them to etch out a chip trace, then you can shine lasers to carve up the chip. Just use stronger lasers.
- appease7727 1y agoLots of automation. Dicing is automatic, bonding, testing are automatic. The manual work is mostly just transporting materials. The bonding machines are crazy. Definitely look it up on YouTube, the machine puts down bond wires super fast. The other part of it is sheer scale. Once you start making thousands or millions of something, economies of scale drive the costs way down
- rwmj 1y agoAnd for reference there's a section in this BBC film about how it was done in the 1970s, by hand: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z4rrj https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z4rrj
- wildzzz 1y agoBond wires really are a thing of the past now except in niche applications or legacy chips. Flip chip designs have the die directly interface with a substrate that is then soldered to the board. With the kinds of speedy signals modern chips use, bond wires introduce impedance mismatch that degrades quality. This is related to why you don't see many new designs using pins.
- tmp10423288442 1y agoWell, these ones are RFID chips, so they don't need to be connected at all - they are read wirelessly.
- jsnsnsn 1y agoYou significantly underestimate the size of sugar crystals ^^
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]