P-III Autopsy

“For teaching a course I needed to take a closer look at a CPU.
I asked around and got my hands on an old P-III Coppermine that was
about to get thrown out. I’ll start with a disclaimer: I know
virtually nothing about CPUs, so if I claim something to be true,
it probably isn’t.

“The first challenge is to get the actual silicon processor chip
off of the plastic bonding board. In the picture below, the blue
thing you see is the back side of the processor chip. When the
processor is finished, it is turned upside down and bonded to the
green circuit board. This allows the metal pads on the silicon chip
and the pads on the circuit board to join, creating a connection
(this is one of those claims…). I believe that the CPU at that
stage is heated up in order to melt the joints and thereby solder
them together.

“Click images for full-size. Especially the scanning electron
microscope images below could be interesting to view in all its
splendor.”

Complete
Story