Where can I find the 3D blueprint that Intel used to make the Skylake chip?

ADVANCESSSS

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Feb 4, 2016
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I want to see it. I want to zoom in and out of it. I want to try to understand it.

I know they have one for each chip, that's how they designed all of the wires and components on it. Then, they print it off or just use it as reference.

If all fails and you don't understand me, I basically want to have the whole Skylake or previous processor chip in front of my eyes to see and be able to zoom in and out right up to it to see evey wire in huge detail.
 
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There is no such thing as a 3D model of the whole chip, chips are made using a hundred or so 2D masks used to control how material gets etched away between material deposition steps. Even if there was, reverse-engineering the chip from that level of detail would take years. The only useful information at the microscopic level is the transistors' geometric details but once you've seen one of those, you've seen the billion others just like it.

The way chips are put together is that fabrication process engineers and researchers design macro libraries for basic building blocks (logic functions, SRAMs of all sizes, register files, etc.) tuned for high density and high speed, those macros get mapped to HDL library components and the rest of...

TJ Hooker

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You're not going to find that anywhere. Why would Intel make that publicly available? They spent millions or billions of dollars in R&D coming up with that design, they're not just going to share it around. Probably the best you're going to do is something like this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9582/intel-skylake-mobile-desktop-launch-architecture-analysis

Edit: Also, in terms of trying to understand a CPU, there are different aspects to it. If you want to understand the digital logic behind it, you're probably better off looking at diagrams that represent the various logic gates and elements with icons, rather than the actual layout that's used for fabrication. Although, again, that's not something that's just going to be floating around the internet.
 

InvalidError

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Moderator
There is no such thing as a 3D model of the whole chip, chips are made using a hundred or so 2D masks used to control how material gets etched away between material deposition steps. Even if there was, reverse-engineering the chip from that level of detail would take years. The only useful information at the microscopic level is the transistors' geometric details but once you've seen one of those, you've seen the billion others just like it.

The way chips are put together is that fabrication process engineers and researchers design macro libraries for basic building blocks (logic functions, SRAMs of all sizes, register files, etc.) tuned for high density and high speed, those macros get mapped to HDL library components and the rest of the chip is designed using Verilog, VHDL, SystemC or similar hardware definition languages that abstract out much of the complexity.

If you want to understand how CPUs work, have a look at Sun's UltraSparc T2 or other open-source CPUs' HDL code.
 
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