Tech, ExplainedSemiconductors and devices
Zone

Semiconductor fabrication and test

Where the design becomes silicon, then gets tested.

Chip design+Semiconductor fabrication and testWhere the design becomes silicon, then gets tested.Semiconductor manufacturing equipmentLayers a few atoms thick, laid and etched.+Wafer inspection and measurementDefects too small to see, found early.+Semiconductor foundryYour chip design, printed by someone else.+OSAT (chip assembly and test)Cutting, packaging and testing every chip.+Oscilloscopes and test instrumentsWatching a signal change over time.+CONCEPTS IN THIS SCENEVLSI design flowFabless chip designSemiconductor yieldSemiconductor IP licensingRISC-VInstruction set architecture (ISA)Vendor lock-inAutomated testingAI coding agentsAnomaly detectionChip design+Semiconductor fabrication and testWhere the design becomes silicon, then gets tested.Semiconductormanufacturing equipmentLayers a few atomsthick, laid and etched.+Wafer inspectionand measurementDefects too smallto see, found early.+Semiconductor foundryYour chip design,printed by someone else.+OSAT (chipassembly and test)Cutting, packaging andtesting every chip.+Oscilloscopes andtest instrumentsWatching a signal change over time.+CONCEPTS IN THIS SCENEVLSI design flowFabless chip designSemiconductor yieldSemiconductor IP licensingRISC-VInstruction set architecture (ISA)Vendor lock-inAutomated testingAI coding agentsAnomaly detectionChip design+Semiconductor fabrication and testWhere the design becomes silicon, then gets tested.Semiconductormanufacturing equipmentLayers a few atoms thick, laid and etched.+Wafer inspection and measurementDefects too small to see, found early.+Semiconductor foundryYour chip design, printed by someone else.+OSAT (chip assembly and test)Cutting, packaging and testing every chip.+Oscilloscopes and test instrumentsWatching a signal change over time.+CONCEPTS IN THIS SCENEVLSI design flowFabless chip designSemiconductor yieldSemiconductor IP licensingRISC-VInstruction set architecture (ISA)Vendor lock-inAutomated testingAI coding agentsAnomaly detection
The zone holds the five products of making a chip: the manufacturing equipment and the inspection systems inside the fab, the foundry that runs them, the assembly and test plant that packages chips, and the test instruments.
opens a page inside this one a page in the same scene a page in another scene a concept page a label only, with no page

Semiconductor fabrication and test is the stage in which a chip's design becomes real silicon, and each chip is then packaged and tested. It covers the machines that build and inspect each layer of a chip, the factories that run those machines, the plants that package chips, and the instruments that test them.

Chips are made in a fab, short for fabrication plant. A semiconductor foundry is a fab that makes chips for other companies. Most chip companies have no fab of their own, and they are called fabless. The leading foundries are in Taiwan, South Korea and the United States. A leading fab costs tens of billions of dollars to build.

Inside the fab, chips are made many at a time on a wafer, a thin disc of silicon usually 300 millimetres across. The wafer passes through hundreds of steps over about three months, in a clean room whose air is far cleaner than a hospital operating theatre's. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment lays very thin layers on the wafer. It then etches away each layer wherever the printed circuit pattern marks it for removal. After each step, wafer inspection and measurement systems look for defects too small to see, and measure what was built.

A finished wafer holds hundreds or thousands of chips. Each one is called a die. In an OSAT (chip assembly and test) plant, the wafer is cut into dies. Each die is sealed in a package, a small case with metal contacts, and tested. Engineers use oscilloscopes and test instruments to test chips, boards and phones, both while they are designed and while they are made.

Not every die works. The share that works is the yield, and the fab earns money only on working chips. So finding a defect early, and fixing its cause, is worth a great deal. Software for anomaly detection watches the machines' sensor readings and the inspection results for early signs of a problem.

India is entering this stage. Tata Electronics is building India's first commercial fab at Dholera in Gujarat. Micron Technology's plant at Sanand in Gujarat and Tata's plant at Jagiroad in Assam will assemble and test chips. The page on semiconductor fabs in India explains these plants.

In this zone

Semiconductor manufacturing equipmentWafer inspection and measurementSemiconductor foundryOSAT (chip assembly and test)Oscilloscopes and test instruments

Concepts

Semiconductor yieldAnomaly detectionFabless chip design
Tech, Explained is a part of ingrid.fyi. Every page explains one piece of technology in plain words.