How Chips are Manufactured

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how chips such as microprocessors, video processors, memories, chipsets etc are created and manufactured? In this tutorial we will explain everything you need to know about chip manufacturing process.

Semiconductor manufacturing process can be summarized in the following steps:

• Chip design: Where engineers design the chip, i.e., how it will work. From this step come several masks (which are sort of blueprints on how the chip must be manufactured) that will be used on the wafer fabrication.
• Wafer fabrication: This is the main chip manufacturing process, which we will be exploring on this tutorial.
• Die preparation: This step consists basically in cutting the chips from the wafer.
• Packaging: In this step terminals and a body are added to the chip.
• Testing: The chip is tested and then sold.

Each one of these steps can be broke down into several other steps.

When we say “chip manufacturing” usually we think about the wafer fabrication step, which is the most complicated one. That is the step we will be explaining in this tutorial.