A Beginner's Guide to Chip Manufacturing

Chip manufacturing involves hundreds of steps and can take up to four months from design to mass production. In the clean room of the fabrication, precious wafers are continuously transferred through mechanical equipment, with air quality and temperature under strict control throughout the process.

Manufacturing the chips requires a constant accumulation of patterns on the wafers, which are connected lengthwise and can reach more than 100 layers.

Key processes in chip manufacturing (10 steps)

1. Deposition

The first step in fabricating a chip is usually the deposition of a thin film of material onto a wafer. The material can be a conductor, insulator or semiconductor.

2. Photoresist Coating

Before lithography, a wafer is coated with a photosensitive material called "photoresist" or "photoresist" and then placed in a lithography machine.

3. Exposure

A blueprint of the pattern to be printed is created on a mask plate. Once the wafer is placed in the lithograph, a light beam is projected onto the wafer through the mask plate. The optics inside the lithography machine shrink and focus the pattern onto the photoresist coating. Under the light beam, the photoresist undergoes a chemical reaction and the pattern on the photomask is thus imprinted onto the photoresist coating.

4. Calculated lithography

ASML integrates existing lithography data and wafer test data to create an algorithmic model to accurately adjust the pattern.

5. Baking and Development

After the wafers leave the lithography machine, they are baked and developed to permanently fix the photolithography pattern. Excess photoresist is washed away and part of the coating is left blank.

6. Etching

After the development is completed, the excess blank portion is removed using materials such as gas to form the 3D circuit pattern.

7. Metrology and Inspection

During the chip production process, the wafers are always measured and inspected to ensure that there are no errors. Inspection results are fed back to the lithography system to further optimize and adjust the equipment.

8. Ion Injection

Before removing the remaining photoresist, wafers can be bombarded with positive or negative ions to tune the semiconductor properties of some patterns.

9. Repeat process steps as needed

From thin film deposition to photoresist removal, the entire process covers the wafer with a layer of pattern. And to form the integrated circuit on the wafer and complete the chip fabrication, this process needs to be repeated continuously, up to 100 times.

10. Packaging the chip

In the final step, the wafer is cut to obtain a single chip, which is encapsulated in a protective case. This way, the finished chip is ready to be used to produce a TV, tablet or other digital device!