Pictures to: 5.4 Microchip Development

	Pictures to:
	5.4 Microchip Development
	My first job in microelectronic development was to provide for some analytic, i.e. trying to figure out why some chips didn't work as expected. That turns you and everybody else quickly to general cleanliness and the reasons why one works in a cloakroom. Telling regular workers to put on a kind of full body condom is one thing, coercing engineers and scientists to do this is another thing entirely. The typical response is: “why?”. These gents (and in particular the ladies, whose hairdo was ruined by advanced clean room garb) wanted to know if those clean room suits really worked and if yes, how well. So we run all kinds of tests and produced all kinds of pictures to show why one had to do all this. Dr. Haudek in my group specialized in producing wonderful pictures in this context, some of which are shown below.
		Some of these pictures (or very similar ones) were used in the publications.

Hair (from a female) on a 256 kbit memory chip.
Just one of the little flakes of the hair would be enough to cover one memory cell.

Hair on a 4Mbit memory chip.
It also show how much the structure sizes decreased
- compare with the hair on a 256 kbit DRAM just above

Pollen (from some daisy) on 256 k DRAM.

Red blood cells on a 1 Mbit memory

A coated metal particle
Probably a tiny drop of Al that was burnt off by a an electrical discharge
in a sputtering machine and hit the Si as a solidified droplet .
It was coated with Al which was subsequently structured by etching.
Four conducting lines are now short circuited.

Here is a particle of unknown nature.
Whatever it is, it will kill a chip.

Spiderwebs on a 256 k DRAM
Mother nature then (1985 or so) was still ahead when it came
to small structures. A typical strand of spider silk consists of several
individual strings with diameters around 0.2 µm.
Rather clumsy by todays micro-electronic standards

Educational pictures: especially for women.
From upper left to lower right:
Crystals of dry shampoo on 256 k DRAM
Nail polish break-off on 246 k DRAM
Hair after spraying on 256 k DRAM
Skin particles flaked off

Educational pictures of particle sources.
From upper left to lower right:
Necklace chain, worn for 2 days
Top of ball point writer
Particles on the inside of finger ring
Dust on a piece of plastic

Here is a picture with a certain esthetic valuer, I think

Prototype Siemens 16 Mbit DRAM chip
My baby! I was the project leader for this Siemens 16 MB DRAM project.

Next, a few cross-sections through DRAMs,
I start with a comparison of 4 generations of DRAMs

Comparison of 4 DRAM generators
The picture is actually taken from my ELMAT Hyperscript
It appears to be the only picture of this type
I hope that somebody will augment it with the next generations

Next a cross-section through “my baby”, the 16 Mbit DRAM I was the project leader for this chip, after all.


Cross-section through 16 Mbit DRAM.

TEM cross-section of trench capacitor
Note the thin triple layer "ONO"

What you find in a Clean room basement.
There is just as much high-tech stuff down there as upstairs in the working area.

With frame

5.4 Microchip Development