Abstract
Circuit manufacturing was the subject of a seminar given by Laurent Thénié of Cadence Systems Design. He detailed the lithographic principle of manufacturing, the long and numerous steps involved, and the factories and their machines. A generation of circuits is characterized by the size of the transistor, currently 65 or 50 nanometers. Considerable complications arise from the non-linear nature of modern etching, which relies on images much finer than the wavelength of their light sources. Finally, all manufactured circuits have to be tested one by one, as a single manufacturing problem (e.g., a single speck of dust) is enough to render a circuit inoperative. The tests are based on long sequences provided by the EDA tools.
Manufacturing is in fact very separate from design: the EDA tools define exactly what needs to be manufactured and tested, and the manufacturer is not at all concerned by what the circuit does. A major problem is that the price of the factory increases dramatically with each generation, and will soon reach tens of billions of euros. Although the object it manufactures is one of the lightest, the industry is one of the heaviest!
