Intel Pentium chip wire bonding

Physical-object demonstration of "ubiquity from chips to ships" — 400 leads per chip, 20-year-old bonding technology still in use.

Welding is ubiquitous. You can go to very small things like semiconductor chips. [Tom holds up a semiconductor chip.] This is a practice chip from Intel from almost 20 years ago. [Tom produces another chip.] And here's my original Pentium. It's got a little ink dot on it, so it's a bad Pentium chip. That's 20-year-old semiconductor technology. They still use this type of bonding to do the lead connection. You've got about 400 leads going in and out of that chip. That's all part of bonding technology, and we will talk about that in this module this semester.