Microchips are made by building up layers of interconnected patterns on a silicon wafer.
The microchip manufacturing process involves hundreds of steps and can take up to four months from design to mass production. In the cleanrooms of the chipmakers’ fabs (fabrication facilities), air quality and temperature are kept tightly controlled as robots transport their precious wafers from machine to machine.
Tiny skyscrapers
Modern chips can have up to 100 layers, which all need to align on top of each other with nanometer precision (called 'overlay'). The size of the features printed on the chip varies depending on the layer, which means that different types of lithography systems are used for different layers. Our latest-generation EUV (extreme ultraviolet) machines are used for the most critical layers with the smallest features, and our DUV (deep ultraviolet) machines for the less critical layers with larger features.
How clean is ‘clean’?
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