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Such innovations as this front-opening unified pod are used to transport production lots of wafers safely. Courtesy Intel Corporation.

Turning silicon into a semiconductor chip is a meticulous undertaking. It requires the multidisciplinary expertise of chemical engineers, along with many other technical specialists.

Wafers

The process starts with the creation of a pure, monocrystalline ingot of silicon, typically 6 to 12 inches in diameter. The ingot is then sliced into ultrathin wafers, each less than 1/40th of an inch thick.

. . . into chips

The wafers are first polished using a specialized technique that blends nanosized abrasive particles into a polishing slurry. The highly polished wafers next undergo a successive series of process steps. Each step involves the deposit of a complex layer of either a conductor, a semiconductor, or an insulating material. These materials deposited in many layers produce the transistors, resistors, and capacitors that ultimately make up an integrated circuit.

Modern transistors are many times smaller than the transistors that were first invented only 60 years ago and many more times smaller than the vacuum tubes used in radios, TVs, and early computers only 30 years ago. The circuits in these tiny, almost nanoscale transistors are the basic tools for cell phones, iPods, computers, and so many other appliances that were not available even 20 years ago.