Materials used for making Microprocessor (CPU)

                       Microprocessors are the heart of  any computers,laptops,mobile phones,servers,super computers and complex military and space systems.Today we are going to deeply analyse What are the materials are used for making the modern microprocessors.

First we wanna know what are the electronic components are used to making microprocessors. Commonly there are three electronic components are used these are

1. Transistors
2. Resistors
3. Capacitors
4. Diodes

1.Transistor

 

      A transistor is a semiconductor device with three terminal that works by controlling the flow of the electric current.

      Commonly made of germanium or silicon layers, a transistor requires very little current to operate and, thus, releases very little heat. Depending upon its configuration, it can be utilized in several ways, such as an amplifier, oscillator, rectifier, and/or switch.

    

      Transistors are used to make logic gates,these logic gates are used to make flip-flops.Gates are used to make sequential circuits and both the  logic gates & flip flops are than used to make the different building blocks of a the microprocessors like Arithmetic Logic Unit(ALU) and others.

2.Resistor 

   

       A transistor is a passive two terminal electronic component that limits the flow of the electrical current in a electronic circuit.There are many different types of transistors available each transistors are made with different materials as a major material.

1. Carbon composition resistors: Carbon power,Insulating ceramic,binder materials
2. Carbon film resistors: Thin layer of carbon,insulating rod
3. Thick film resistor: Conductive ceramic,glass mixture
4. Metal film resistor: Metal alloy(usually nickel-chromium alloy)
5. Wire-wound resistor: Nickel chromium alloy,ceramic bobbin.

3.Capacitor

      A capacitor is a passive  electronic component that stores energy in the form of a electronic fields in a short period of time and releases the energy when it requires.

Commonly the capacitors made with the Aluminum,Tantalum,Silver,Brass(in variable air capacitor),liquid mercury and carbon nano-tubes.

4.Diode (LED)

  

 A diode is a semiconductor device with two terminals called anode and cathode.It allows current to flow through in only one direction & blocks the current that flows in the other direction.It is usually used for knowing the current flowing or not.

There are many different materials are used for making different colors of diodes.Each materials makes different colors.Commonly used materials are

1. Gallium arsenide(GaAs)
2. Gallium phosphide(GaP)
3. Gallium arsenide phosphide(GaAsP)
4. Aluminum-gallium-arsenide(AlGaAs)

             Now we know what are the electronic components are used in the microprocessors.Next we are going to know what happening in the microprocessors when we dealing with the computers,mobile phones and so on.

What's happening inside in the microprocessor?

           Microprocessors performs three basic steps.

Step 1:First,it fetches the instructions from the computer memory,

Step 2:Second,to determines what the instructions means with the help of decoding circuitry,

Step 3:Third,it executes the instructions and tells to softwares and hardwares what to do.

Materials:

           Now we start what are the other materials are used for making the microprocessors along with those electronic components.There are three materials are used to build the microprocessors.They are

a)Silicon
b)Copper
c)Plastic

A) Silicon:
                   Silicon is one of the semiconductor material.It is available in some parts of the earth and it is used for making many electronic components like transistors,diodes,etc.
                     Sometimes the Germanium is also used, because it's also a semiconductor material. Integrated circuits(IC"s)&  microchips are made up of with this silicon.Because it can withstand in the higher temperature.Silicons are obtained from the sand .The sand has a higher percentage of silicon dioxide(SiO2).

B) Copper:
                    It is a good conductor,it is used to make the motherboards and associated wires,Printed Circuit Boards(PCBs) also uses this copper to perfectly conduct the electricity.
                    
C) Plastic:
                    Plastics are mainly used for insulating wires,buses.In march 2011 the world's first Plastic microprocessor was made up of with 4000 plastics or organic and transistors in Europe.Now a days plastics slowly replaces the silicons in the microprocessors industry.

FACTS

              The RAM is places inside the computer at a proper place without the RAM the processor won't work.So the processor speed is depends on RAM.The memory size of the RAM higher than the processor speed is also high.

NOTE:The huge amount of RAM cannot increase the processor speed (i.e) the specific processor can only increase particular Hertz of speed.

         We almost finished but before we finish it completely  we must know one important thing that is How many transistors are used on the microprocessors.

Transistors are the most important component in the microprocessors. Today's microprocessors contains billions of transistors.The following table contains some randoms processors and its transistors count.

Transistors count:

                  

Processors	Transistor count	Released year
Intel 4004	2,300	1971
Intel 8008	3,500	1972
Motorola 6800	4100	1974
ARM 1	25,000	1985
Pentium	3,100,000	1993
ARM 7	5,78977	1994
IBM six core & EC12	2,750,000,000	2012
Intel 62-core Xeon phi	5,000,000,000	2012
XBox one main soc	5,000,000,000	2013

Transistors count

 Now you think little bit, How many processors manufacturers in the world?

Here the list of microprocessors in the world that are used in our every day life,

List of Microprocessors [Source: Wikipedia]

1. Altera 
2. AMD (advanced micro Device)
3. Analog Devices
4. Apollo
5. ARM (Advanced RISC Machines)
6. Atmel
7. Data Gereral
8. Digital Equipment Corporation
9. Elbrus
10. Ensilica
11. Fairchild Semiconductor
12. Freescale Semiconductor (Motorola)
13. Hewlett - Packard
14. Hitachi
15. Inmos
16. IBM (International Business Machine)
17. Intel (Integrated Electronics)
18. Interfil
19. Lattice Semiconductor
20. MIPS Technologies
21. MVS Technology
22. National Semiconductor
23. NEC (Nippon Denk,Kabulhki Gaisha)
24. NVIDIA
25. NXP (Philips Semiconductors)
26. open cores
27. oracle Corporation (Sun Microsystem)
28. Power
29. Power -AS
30. RCA
31. Renesas Electronics
32. ShenWei 
33. tenal Instruments
34. VIA
35. Western Design Center
36. Western Digital
37. Western Electric
38. Xilinx
39. Zmos
40. Zilog

Also Read: Materials used for making iPhone parts, Google Glass parts.

 Today's Quote:
                    
                                 "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new"
                                                                 
                                                                                                                            - Albert Einstein