15 May
1998
15 May
'98
4:18 p.m.
Noone really cares about used-up silicon. My uncle works at a major
company that builds semiconductor factories (A meta-semiconductor
factory?), the name of whic escapes me. It is the major one, though.
Anyway, he has an bad wafer, of Pentium chips.
By the way, is it theoretically possible to make an IC with only
a prototype IC and an arbitrary amount of machinery?
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into it within
the first 5 or so hits.
Yes, there's an image of the 4004 die on Coulson's site. But if
collecting classic computers was only about finding GIFs on the
web, we'd all have pretty big collections, wouldn't we? :-)
Sad to say, but I'd like to get two 4004s - one to smash, one to
keep as-is. I get the impression they're considerably less rare
than many of the computers we collect, having been used in more
popular computerized devices.
For that matter, I'd like to get more rejected silicon dies.
I have one three-inch wafer containing an HP CPU from the early
80s, and I lusted at the eight-inch wafers I saw at a friend's
office. Anyone know anyone at a foundry? Or do they religiously
recycle the silicon after it's been contaminated with circuitry?
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>