We often talk about processors , possibly the # 1 item in the hardware world. We are talking about its cores, its lithography and the millions of transistors that they contain inside, and surely you have already seen many wafers with the chips but, have you ever seen a real CPU inside ? In this article we are going to show you, from a microscope view, what a processor looks like inside.
In order to see a processor under the microscope and know what is inside it, it is first necessary to “destroy” it. This is breaking it into small pieces that can be placed on the tray of an electron microscope, the only one accurate enough to see the transistors, which is the objective.
What is a CPU inside like?
In the video below, courtesy of LaughsMicroscopically, they use an Intel Celeron D320 single-core 2.3 GHz processor with 73W TDP, manufactured in 2004 with 90-nanometer lithography. It must be borne in mind that with current technology much more powerful equipment would be needed to be able to take high resolution images of the transistors used today, which is why a processor with such a “large” lithography has been used , but still allows us to really see what a real processor looks like on the inside.
As you can see in the video and as we have already said, first they break the processor into small pieces that they can adapt to the microscope, and then they zoom in to see it more and more closely. Here you can see one of the fragments before the zoom starts to do its job. Such an image could be obtained with a “domestic” microscope of about 200 magnification. The piece that is seen has, from top to bottom, 1,668 mm.
As the image gets closer we can see more clearly the circuitry and internal connections. It goes without saying that a modern processor is much more complicated than this Intel Celeron manufactured in 2004, but it is still interesting to see how, having literally broken it, we can see the different layers of which it is composed.
In this image the transistors are already beginning to be seen perfectly, and note that the resolution is already 3,500 increases, showing pieces of 30 micrometers.
With 35,000 increases we can already see perfectly the logic gates of the transistors. In the same image they are already telling us that the thickness of these is 196.6 nm, and at the bottom you can see, in the legend, what distance is 3 micrometers in comparison.
In any case, we recommend that you watch the complete video, because below they show some additional images of what a CPU looks like inside, and also coloring them to better differentiate its parts.
It is curious that, although when Intel and AMD tell us about millions of transistors inside their processors, in reality these are not all the same as could be implied, and the proof is found in this video that shows us that there are various forms and connections between them within. The reason for this is none other than the fact that not all logic gates have the same function, and that is that each processor is capable of executing certain instructions because it is physically capable of it, neither more nor less.
