Chip Manufacturing - How Are Microchips Made? | Infineon Access

"Time for the coat," he muttered, adjusting his clean-room suit.

Finally, the . A diamond saw screamed through the silicon, separating the wafer into hundreds of individual chips, each no bigger than a fingernail. Chip Manufacturing - How are Microchips made? | Infineon

A blast of deep ultraviolet light shot through the mask. Where the light hit the wafer, the "batter" hardened; where it was blocked, it remained soft. With a chemical wash, the soft parts vanished, leaving behind the skeletal remains of a circuit. "Time for the coat," he muttered, adjusting his

Days passed. Layer upon layer of copper "highways" were laid down to connect the transistors. By the end, the wafer looked like a shimmering city seen from orbit. A blast of deep ultraviolet light shot through the mask

But a skeleton has no soul. To give the chip "life," Silas moved to . He watched the monitors as machines bombarded the silicon with specific atoms, turning bits of the wafer into conductors or insulators. This created the transistors—the tiny switches that would soon be snapping on and off billions of times a second.

He placed it in its protective housing. "Go to work," he whispered. The sand had learned to think.

The process was a high-stakes dance called . First, a light-sensitive liquid—the photoresist—was spun onto the wafer, coating it in a perfect, glassy film. Then came the stencil, or "mask." It held the blueprint of a labyrinth so complex that if you enlarged it, it would look like a map of every street in the world overlapping ten times.