General Questions About Wafer and Chip

According to the trade war between the US and China, the topic of “chips” is rampant. Especially for high-tech enterprises in China, and HUA WEI is one of those companies. As we known that the country’s weapon cannot be controlled by others, so we should know that Wafer is the main material of chip and it is very important.

1. What is a chip?

The chip is composed of N numbers of multiple semiconductor devices, where semiconductors generally include diodes, bipolar junction transistor, field effect transistor, low-power resistor, inductor, capacitor, etc.. In addition, Silicon and Germanium are two commonly used in semiconductor materials, and their characteristics and materials are easy to be used in above technologies with large quality and low cost. A silicon chip is composed of a large number of semiconductors devices, and the function is to form semiconductors into circuits as needed and exit in the silicon chip, then it will become an IC after packaging.

2. What is a wafer?

Wafer represents the silicon chip which is used to make silicon semiconductor integrated circuit, and due to its circular shape, we call it wafer. Besides, it will become IC products with special electrical functions by processing into various circuit element structures on silicon wafer.

As we know that the raw material of the wafer is silicon, and there is inexhaustible silicon dioxide on the surface of the earth crust. Silicon dioxide ore is refined by electric arc furnace, then chlorinated with hydrochloric acid, and polycrystalline silicon can be made with a purity of 0.99999999999 after distillation.

After that, wafer manufacturer will melt those polycrystalline silicon, then mix a small seed crystal of crystalline silicon, and pull it out slowly to form a monocrystalline-silicon-stick. According to the crystalline-silicon-stick is gradually generated from a small crystal grain in the molten raw silicon, this process is called “Kyropoulos method”. After being ground, polished and aliced, the crystalline-silicon-stick will become the basic raw material of integrated circuit factory--silicon wafer, which is the “wafer”.

3. Wafer manufactures

Global wafer manufactures include: Shin-Etsu of Japan, Sumco of Japan, Global wafer of Taiwan, Siltronic of Germany, LG siltron of Korea, etc.. The good news is that there are many wafer projects in Mainland China as well, such as Shanghai ZINGSEMI, Chongqing AST, Ningxia Ferrotec, etc.. Since the process of producing wafer is not complicated, there are no technical barriers.

4. What is Foundry?

Due to there is nothing on the wafer, the large wafer has to be cut into many chips. Foundry is to provide manufacturing service to the design company of integrated circuit or electronic factories. And there are some famous global foundries, including TSMC, Samsung and UMC. Now, Chengdu base is the second largest foundry, and the pilot production will take place in December.