Chip Manufacturing Process

The manufacturing process of integrated circuit takes the following steps:

  1. It starts with a silicon crystal ingot, which looks like a giant sausage. Today, ingots are 8-12 inches in diameter and about 12-24 inches long.


  1. An ingot is finely sliced into wafers no more than 0.1 inch thick. A wafer is then used to created chips.
  1. These wafers then go through a series of processing steps, during which patterns of chemicals are placed on each wafer, creating one layer of transistors and two to eight levels of conductors, separated by layers of insulators.

  2. These patterned wafers are then tested with a wafer tester, and a map of the good parts is made.