Chip Fabrication Technology

Information technology does not require a lot of power. This means that electronics that process information (rather than light or sound) can be very small, and millions of transistors can be put on a single chip.

History

• In the late 1940s it was discovered that a few slices of semiconductor material could be used to make an electronic switch. This changed how small electronic switches could be. Since the invention of the transistor, the number of transistors we can put on a single chip has doubled every two years.

Features

• Chip fabrication consists of several steps. It begins with a drawing of the circuit. This drawing will be used to control the etching process. Next, several thin layers of different materials are deposited on a single wafer. These layers consist of semiconductors, conductors or insulators.

Etching and Packaging

• The circuit drawing is used as a guide to etch out one or more layers of deposited material. Different amounts of etching produce different components, such as transistors, resistors and wires. The wafer is then coated with a protective package with some pins left sticking out, and electronic access to the chip is allowed only through the exposed pins.