Hi Do you remember this quarter of a million dollar Ibm processor that I tore down? Well, a lot of you would because I've got half a million views on it. It was incredibly popular, thank you. very much so. Yeah, this is like like a quarter of a million dollars back in the day.

Like, uh, early 90s vintage. It's part of the Ibm System 390r processor family. It's called a Tcm, a thermal conduction module and I won't go into the details of it. But as you can see inside, there's all these thermal slugs and there's like over a hundred little individual semiconductor dies on this thing and a 63 layer job.

I will, uh, include this Ibm Uh Pdf down below for the thermal conduction module. Here it's got all the technical details about this, uh, bad boy, the thermals. And look inside here. It's got 63 layers inside this thing.

It's got over 2 million viewers in it. Uh, it's got like, uh, what is it? Eighty thousand connections and all sorts of absolutely amazing. So this is absolutely incredible. Um, and it would be even today, let you know.

but this was the early 90s. Absolutely fantastic. So definitely go take a look at that video. I'll link it in up down below around.

you know I'll link it in everywhere. Go check it out because, uh, the video may not make a lot of sense until you've actually seen, uh, the details inside this thing. But anyway, in this video, I mentioned that wouldn't it be interesting to actually try and x-ray this thing? actually see if we can see inside those in this 63-layer Pcb and the chips inside this thing. And well, I don't have ready access to an x-ray machine, but a fellow content creator does.

So this is a collaboration video with Peter from Cpu Galaxy. Thank you very much Peter! He's actually got one of these same modules and access to a kick-ass x-ray machine. So let's have a quick look at Peter's channel here because it does not get enough. Love.

He's only got two and a half a thousand subscribers. This is insane once you see his content. Um, so I'll link him his channel down below and somewhere. I'll link it in everywhere.

So doing the solid by subscribing to this channel if you liked this x-ray content we're gonna get from Peta, Definitely go subscribe if you're into any sort of, uh, vintage Cpu stuff. Uh, he's got absolutely everything. Um, absolutely. Intel 4004 Cpus, how microchips are made, manufacturing.

uh, you know, retro bride in vintage, overclocking and stuff like that. He's got like obscure little uh, Crts and and things like that. Absolutely. Here's his monster Cp.

Like here. He's his tear down of this same module and look at this. He's I. I don't have the machining capability to do this, but he's actually machined a cutaway of this.

Isn't this Absolutely gorgeous? Oh, you can see the thermal slugs inside this and he's done this for his. um, you know, like well I had to show his audience. um, but let's actually have a look at his Cpu collection. Take it away Peter.

Welcome to this video, especially on my channel. First of all, I would like to thank you all. For 1000 subscribers, this was his thousand subscriber video and here's his collection in the background. Anyway, go watch his uh intro.

Let's just I'll give you a sneak peek of his collection. Look at, look at this. This is just. this is just nuts.

There's these Ibm Tcms, so here's he's got a couple of them. look and there's that cutaway one. Absolutely gorgeous and like I I won't show you the whole thing. Go.

His collection is just absolutely phenomenal. Look at this. He's got Intel, all the 4 000 series, the 401 through the 404s. Unbelievable.

and this is just oh like yeah. The collection is just insane and the videos he's got on his channel are just incredible. So uh yeah. like a tutorials and repairing stuff.

How to decap chips? Uh like no, come on. two and a half thousand subscribers. This channel is incredible. Go and subscribe and make sure you hit the bell icon for Peter and my channel as well so you get notified of new uploads.

So this is definitely one of those hidden gem channels you're going to want to subscribe to. So anyway, thank you very much Peter for the x-ray All the x-ray stuff you're going to see now inside this and inside another uh chip which is really interesting which we'll see in a minute. So thank you very much Peter. Let's take it away.

Let's go check out the x-rays inside this bad boy. Brilliant right? So what we're going to be uh, using here. I'm not sure the exact model I forgot to ask Peter, but it's a Why Exelon Xylon. I I don't know how you pronounce that.

It's like this is serious bitter kit. This is like these in big industrial uh x-ray machines. Look at all the different models they have. I couldn't pick out the exact one so maybe it's like an older uh one.

or maybe it's just not here anymore. Anyway, Um yeah, it's one of these big bad boy x-ray machines. Uh, like for industrial x-ray and like three-dimensional You can like pan and tilt and like actually see inside this thing. It's not just like one x-ray from the top.

Um, let's go check out the footage. So this is inside the x-ray door. Here you can see the turntable there. so you can see the stepper motor that actually rotates the turntable.

You can see up here. It looks like this rotates it in that direction so it tilts back and forth and then you'll see that. Uh, let's let's have a look and then yeah, you can see that. That's that's the x-ray Head up there.

it's got some fans on top. must get a little bit hot. So let's actually put the module. there.

it is. So he's taken it out of the metal case and so it's just the ceramic module with all the pins on the bottom. So he's putting a chip up in there and you can see how it can. Uh, they can adjust the height, uh as well.

So here's the control panel for this thing. It just allows you to, you know, pan tilt and all that sort of stuff. It's fairly simplistic, but you need to know what you're doing with the like materials and the exposure like in the power limits and all sorts of stuff. And here's the Uh.

There we go. So he's adjusting the uh power like a power level: 142 Kilovolts, 50 microamps, Whack that into your uh, confuser and you'll know the power level. Hang on. I've got to do that.

Oh, that's only 12 watts of x-ray power, but I is that a lot. I don't know all you x-ray aficionados I assume it is. Um, I don't know how high this thing can go though, so maybe he's doing it low. but um, yeah.

Anyway, he can do all sorts of Gamma or enhancing sharpening and all sorts of. You know, you can muck around with these sort of systems until the cows come home, but that looks like the test that. So yeah, we're in high power mode. and yeah, contrast.

So he's just. we've got a live image over here so we'll see that in a sec. Okay, so here we are. We're actually looks like it's doing this live now as you can see as we increase the current there 146 kilovolts we start to see the detail inside this thing.

and here you go. You can actually see inside as it tilts like that. So it can tilt like that. looks like i don't know 45 degrees or something like that.

so it can go either side and then you can rotate the thing like that. That's that's pretty neat. Oh, and then you can adjust the table as well so you can get so you can adjust the table x y and you can adjust the tilt and the height as well. You can see inside there.

they can adjust the height of that everything. So here's his first attempt at a zoom inside this thing. So he's just going to go to a random location and then let's zoom this bad boy. Here we go.

Let's go in and you can see the what looks like uh, square pads. We can have another look inside to correlate, but look at that, you can see the vias, You can see the you can't Curiously, this is one of the most interesting things about this. You can't see the traces. the individual traces on the 64 layers.

Maybe you could if you exposed it differently or something like that. but all those bits there, the the uh, little annulus rings on the vias. um, go into each layer. So I I guess you know if you extrapolated one of them at an angle, you could actually count.

If it joined all 64 layers, you could actually count that. and the big circular things that we're seeing here. They're the pins. They're the pins on the bottom, so that was an attempt at 45 degrees there.

and there we go. You can see it. It's tilting like that. so now we're vertical and that is.

that's fantastic. Look at all the layers, look at all the layers and these these black squares over here. you seen that those were the uh, the multi, uh, multi capacitors. I think four capacitors in one uh unit.

that um yeah that were floating around that I could actually remove. I've done a video. I have to link that in as well where I actually removed those just by pushing them so I didn't have to heat them up. I just pushed them.

That's to do with the uh, type of uh solder that they're using to do this thing. It's just it doesn't have much strength and you can just push the capacitors aside so there's square blocks of the capacitors. Can we see? Oh, contrast? Here we go. We're doing enhancement a bit out of focus now and here we go.

It's got like an optical camera as well. You can see that we're actually targeting which which chip we're actually targeting. So interestingly, you can't see the die. You can't because most of this chip areas is taken up with the die.

So as you can see, there's supposed to be a big die in here. but the x-rays just go straight through the dye. So all you semiconductor physicists out there, um, please leave it in the comments. Um, it just why.

why can't we see the silicon? It just it just goes right through right? So yeah, oh now we're looking like deep into the it's so fascinating. But yeah, I was. As I said, the most amazing thing about this is that you couldn't see the copper traces. Um, so I find that remarkable.

We can see the via contacts like or we can I. I think they're the annulus rings that go around there. but please, like I'm I'm no expert on this uh stuff and neither is Peter. I don't think he's like a physicist and he can explain how x-ray machines work.

He just can use it and uh and has access uh to it. So ah this is. this is cool. You could imagine having one of these toys at work.

You could just play with this all day. Oh my God. there'd be no end of stuff. You'd be x-raying all day.

This is fantastic. But now look, we can see some of you see that text on the side. We could actually see that. That's interesting but yeah um you can see the uh, like the square pads.

which is like how Ibm do their uh array things. So yeah, if we go back to my video here, you can actually see the uh looks like are they can we actually see the copper squares on top but we can't see the traces So that's interesting. And there I am moving that capacitor. I'm just just breaking the car.

I've got a video on the second channel of that. It's just magic. Um, and yes, this is all our oil. uh, filled inside for heat, uh, conduction, uh, purposes.

So it's got a little port on the side you can fill the whole module up. So yeah, obviously we're seeing the uh, the square pads. This is an Ibm technique. I've got an old border showing off in an old video.

I used to have it in the background. um, like on my racks. uh of Ibm. This is how they did their standard Pcb technology.

Uh, for decades? Is they had all these little squares and you could, um, just get a route everything in between those. It was just a standard in-house Ibm way of doing. uh, Pcbs and stuff. so it looks like we can see those.

So like that's with the white ones? Oh no. Hang on. No, no, they're like all over. that's too consistent so I don't think they're the top layer copper pads that we're seeing there.

Look, it's just a consistent square grid, so that's interesting. Uh, yeah, no, there's something something else going on there, so that could be internal. Hmm. So yeah, we're targeting in the middle of a chip there and we're zooming right in.

And so you can see the individual connection layers, but no traces at all. which is fascinating. And so yeah, please leave it in the comments. Um, for those who are really more experienced in this sort of field, please let us know what you think is going on there.

So what we're going to do now is go into this part. It says it's at 45 degrees, but that looks, Look at the camera shot there that looks, uh, near vertical. So I'm not sure what the deal is. But yeah, I just like, does anyone want to count? Oh here.

Yeah, here we go. Are we tilting over? Yeah, that's tilting. but the camera angle is not changing. That's interesting.

What's going on there? Anyway, it looks like we're at a 45 degree angle now. and yep, yeah, you can actually see the pads. You can see the pads on the bottom of the capacitor little array. Uh, capacitor chips there.

So that's interesting. So that yeah, those circles they're They're definitely the pins on the bottom. You can actually see the array. You know, the strips of them.

just like we get inside the module. So yeah, so yeah, you can see. you can see the pads on the bottom of the capacitors there. That's great.

So anyway, yeah, there's a reason why it's not picking up the traces. Whether or not this machine would be capable of picking up the copper traces inside this thing, I'm not entirely sure. Are they, Are they too thin? You know they're like half ounce copper tracers or or less. I'm not sure if we go back to the document.

So there's the actual Uh. aluminum substrate. Um, process. the thin film process.

redundant layer, metallization, lift off stencil, builds, overcoat, final prep, flange, grind, casting, baking, slurry preparation. It's all this big ceramic substrate begins with a preparation of a ceramic slurry and thick film. metal paste, ceramic slurry, alumina, powder, glass, powder, organic binder, plasticizer, solvents, The material engineers that scientists and stuff at Ibm that came up with. all this.

It's just absolutely amazing. Dimensional stability of the green sheet. Um, I I think there's some experts at previous Ibm employees. In the previous video, they commented, uh, somewhere about all this sort of stuff.

So check out the comments of the original video. Ah, there should be more detail there. I'm not sure if I uh, did I pin one? Yeah, here we go. Edward.

I I didn't pin that. I'll pin that now. Yeah, this brings back memories here. Uh, Edward worked at Ibm East Fish School in the 80s.

I worked in manufacturing technology areas where the ceramic modules were created. Um, that is I always. Well, I'm not amazed anymore at the breadth of my Eev blog audience. There's just there's always somebody who's worked on something I've torn down or worked at that company or whatever.

It's just yeah, it's just it's amazing. Plan Employed 15 000 people in weekly production. Could be driven away in the back of two Station wagons. Yeah, an unbelievable amount of engineering went in the design of these modules in the manufacturing process to make them.

The ceramic green sheet material that formed each layer of the module was created by a long sheet roll process. A machine that was approximately 63 feet long to make the cust. The custom machine was 63 feet long just to make the green sheet material that these layers are formed from. Unbelievable, I assume.

Like, yeah, each layer each of the 63 layers is made up of. This, The roll was then taken to a die machine that precisely cut the dimensions of each sheet. The sheets were precisely punched for layer to layer vias and then fed into screening machines that spread Molly denim paste through the mask to create the pattern on each layer. So, is that why we can't So is it a molle denim paste instead of copper? Is it through the mask to create the pattern? The next step is that why we can't see it on the x-ray? The next step was a stacker that aligned and stacked each of the 63 layers so that the Vias from layer to layer would align.

The stack was then pressed and ready to go through the sintering process. The Cinema phone, the ceramic substrates was done in huge Cinerin furnaces that furnaces that had a hydrogen forming gas. Each furnace was loaded by robotic arms that moved assemblies that weighed hundreds of pounds. Wow! When the process was running, the excess hydrogen gas was burned off in a stack.

It looked like something from the Wizard of Oz. Occasionally, there would be an air leak into one of these furnaces where the oxygen hydrogen ratio would be just right to cause an explosion of the entire furnace, shutting it down for an internal rebuild. Oops, Oopsie! On the Ibm production line in the 80s, The ceramic module would then go to the fin films processing section, whereas a Cmp polished for flatness. yeah, I I think somebody else mentioned it was like some ridiculous flatness these things were polished for and the multiple thin layers were deposited using technology adapter from wafer manufacturing in the newest generation of Tcm's which presumably we've got here because I don't think they lasted too much longer after the one we're got.

Uh, there were six layers of thin film redistribution wiring on top of the ceramic before the chips were attached. Wow. This process had to provide for corrections in lower layer yield defects. wow and had to achieve 100 yield over the entire substrate.

There were multiple customization laser repair processes that added subtracted single trace defects. between the chip sites. Wow. I could go on, but I'm running out of steam.

Maybe someone else can pick up and describe the additional complexity of manufacturing process. Wow. Maybe I'll contact um, Ed Ed if you're watching. Uh, could we maybe get you on the Amp hour or something like that to talk about, uh, manufacturing Working at Ibm back in the day? That would be fantastic.

Please Edward, get in contact with me David, Evblog.com That'll be, you know. Thumbs up. If you want to see that or hear that on the Amp hour, that'd be great. How often do you change your processor oil once every two years? Or 50 billion quadrillion instructions? Whichever comes first, I'll show you this bit.

Watch this. You can actually see the pins extend out there so you can see the metal pins. So that's great. But as I said yeah, it looks like oh no, no, sorry, I was mistaken about the capacitors.

That was just. I thought, nah, I thought there was one on the top. There's not. No, it's You can see that there's only the capacitors on the bottom layer.

Like that. I thought, yeah, you get, you know, if you're not thinking Marty had a hard time thinking fourth dimensionally? Um, yeah, you've got to even just think three dimensionally here to see what's going on. So yeah, oh yeah. there we go.

So yeah. once again, See, he changed the settings there and then the pins vanished. So you know that's really interesting. So there's lots of stuff you can do and then he fiddles with the contrast and whatnot.

So there really is an art in using these machines. to you know get exactly what you want. but that is just brilliant. Look at that.

Thank you very much Peter. We've got uh so that's it for the Uh Tcm, but we've got one more treat for you. Let's check it out. Hands up.

If you remember these bad boys, the Della Stella Semiconductor real time chip with the famous battery in it that was supposed to only last 10 years, but they generally lasted about 20 before they started to die. So these are classic real-time clock chips that are in like tons of old test gear and and stuff like that. So you know if you're buying used stuff on ebay, this has got a date of 93 on it. There we go.

46 weeks 93. So geez, that's 27 years old that one's you know it could still be going. You never know. Anyway, it's got a Lithium primary battery in it and that just powered the real-time clock.

It was just embedded potted inside this thing so if you ever wanted to have a look inside one of these now thanks to Peter, he's put it inside the x-ray machine. So let's check out the footage and here's just an x-ray of like straight down from the top So you can see the battery holder. Here you can see the die underneath. It's great.

I love it how you can just see through the battery like this. This is like brill. He's done brilliantly to expose this uh thing for this shot. Absolutely.

You can see the Bond wires in there. Uh, going over. That's just fantastic. This, of course.

Um, guess what? This is Tada Spoiler alert. It's a 32.768 Kilohertz watch crystal. and yeah, they've just tacked that onto a couple of the pins inside. They've just sold it.

Look, you can even see the like, it's been wrapped around. You can see the pin has just been wrapped around a, um, you know, part of the pin extended up, uh, into the module and then they just wrapped the. you know, took an existing a regular off-the-shelf uh, through-hole watch crystal and then just wrap the leads around like that and you can see it even wraps around like that and then comes out like that. That's that is great.

and they just soldered that inside. But yeah. anyway. Absolutely fascinating.

It looks like the battery goes directly onto these pins here. does it? And you can see the battery contacts in here. you can make out. Wow.

that's just a fantastic exposure. And of course that's just the um, the the die inside and it's just got a battery and an external crystal just embedded in the module. That's it. So that's just what.

a 20, 32 coins or 2050 or something. Uh, quite a 16. I don't know if a 20 fits in there, does it? Um yeah. like a 16.

I don't know how thick that is, but let's uh. we've got some video footage here. we go look at that. Still can't quite make out what thickness that is.

But oh there you go. look at the pins. This way, this seems upside down doesn't it? is that? That's upside down right? The pins are sticking up dead bug style. There you go, That's great.

and here we go. He just fades in to the watch crystal there. we can't unfortunately can't see the quartz inside there. There'll be a like a thin sheets of uh quartz going inside that.

but you can see the certainly see the internal connection with the crystal like that. So yeah, I don't know. Is it would it even be possible to use an x-ray machine to see our quartz crystal? Probably not. Physicists, leave it in the comments down below.

Anyway, there you go and last video here. Let's just have a zoom in. and of course you're not going to see we can actually see the die inside this one where we couldn't actually see uh, the outline of the die in the Ibm processor teardown. so that's interrupt.

look. I love how like the traces only appear under the uh crystal there and they only appear under there. That's just like the exposure limits and stuff. So there's the individual bond wires.

Check that out, you can see the bonding. Oh, isn't that great? Wow, that is terrific. No image gets a bit noisy, doesn't it there? Oh no, No. There we go.

No, it's come good. Oh wow. Oh, that was stunningly sharp at that point. There wow, is that the maximum zoom they can do? I'm not sure what the capabilities of this machine were, and Peter will uh, no doubt, leave uh details in the comments down below so that that's great.

So that's a little bonus content there. The Dallas Semiconductor Real-time chip always wanted to see inside one of those things, but of course they're potted so you know, impossible to get these apart. So thank you very much Peter for that. That's absolutely fascinating.

So there you have it, that's inside an Ibm processor that we looked at tear down. So I'll put the uh teardown video. I'll link that in. But more importantly, thank you very much for this collaboration with Cp Peter from Cpu Galaxy.

So definitely do yourself a favor and go over to his channel and subscribe the channel name. I don't know if it's got Cpu Galaxy there, can you just get bloody Youtube and they're convoluted unique Ids. So most importantly, thank you very much Peter! This has been an awesome collaboration. I love this and he's got a unique channel you're definitely going to want to subscribe to.

Let's get him over well over 10k subs. Let's get him into the five-digit uh range. Heck, if you know half a million people watch the previous video, if you know just like one-fifth of those subscribed, he'd get his Youtube silver award. He definitely, uh, deserves it because there's some great content there.

So thank you very much Peter! This is absolutely fantastic. Um, yeah, Youtube channel? Cpu, Galaxy, it's Linkedin. Definitely do yourself a favor and subscribe anyway. If you liked the video, please give it a big thumbs up.

As always, discuss down below and uh yeah, if you've got any more details about, like the stuff we're seeing here with the x-rays, If you're an expert at this sort of stuff, yeah, please definitely leave it in Comment: As always, there's a link to my Ev blog forum you can discuss, uh, every single video has its own thread over there and you can check out all my alternative platforms. I'm not just on the Youtubes catch you next time you.