Essential Guide to Semiconductors, The

Chapter 4. How Chips Are Made

In this chapter...

• Clean Rooms and Fabs

• Developing Technology: Chips and Photography

• Silicon Ingots to Start

• Polishing the Wafer Smooth

• Building the Layer Cake

• Laser Surgery: Etching Away the Transistors

• Step and Repeat

• Etching Bath

• Ready for the Metal Round

• Testing Phase I

• Bringing out the Diamonds

• Sorting the Fast From the Merely Good

• Wrap It Up

• How Many Nanometers in a Micron?

• Let's Get Small

Silicon chips are made in a process that's a combination of the familiar and the bizarre. Some aspects are as familiar as developing a few photographs, whereas others resemble space exploration or subatomic physics. In the end, it's all of these and the process gets stranger and more fascinating the more you learn about it. In this chapter ...