Flip-Chip describes any of the main CPUs on the market at the moment, ie Intel Celeron, PIII, PIV, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon (Tbird, XP, MP). What does it mean....ok, let's see if I can draw diagrams in ASCII....Here is a diagram of a single transistor in a piece of silicon: sssssssssss____________ _________===========___________ |ssss\____/ssssssssssssss\_____/sssss| |ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss| |ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss| |_______________________________ | Ignore the s's, they're just placeholders Now, you can see that the important bits, ie the gate and the semiconductor junctions are all at the top of this diagram, and at the bottom you've got a thick, unused wedge of doped silicon. Obviously the heat is generated where you're doing things, which is only in the top part of the picture above. However, this is also the place where all your interconnects to the chip are, and so, in older-style chips (ie non-flip-chips), the picture above is inverted, with all of the gates and implanted doping being at the bottom of the chip, so that the leads can be taken off to pins very easily. However, that also means that the heat generated has to travel through all of your unused silicon substrate to get to the heatsink, which would be at the bottom of the picture. In a flip chip, the die is "flipped" over, so that all of the working parts of the chip are at the top, making it much easier to remove the heat, but more difficult to take the signals out. This is also why "flip-chip" style CPUs are so easy to damage, because the very surface of the silicon is the working part of the process, so it only requires a scratch or a slight chip to destroy the CPU entirely. This can be remedied by the use of a protective heat spreader, as on the P4 and Tualatin chips. There are plenty of non-flip-chips still being produced. The CPU is likely to be the only one in your system, with the GPU on your graphics card, the northbridge of your motherboard and other such chips not being produced this way (Although some of intel's latest chipsets (i845?) have been produced this way).
Use the code command for ASCII Art! Code: ___________ _________===========___________ | \____/ \_____/ | | | | | |_____________________________| Ahhh much better......
Cheers... As you might be able to tell, hardware is my forté, not software. Software is the evil influence that causes grief with all my beautiful hardware. Well, what do you expect from an electronic engineer?:rofl:
