A wafer is a thin, perfectly flat disk sliced from a cylindrical ingot of monocrystalline silicon or other semiconductor material like gallium arsenide. It undergoes multiple stages of photolithography, doping, and etching to build hundreds or thousands of individual chips on its surface. Once fabrication is complete, the wafer is diced into individual units for packaging.
Heard on the job
The fab just scrapped an entire 300mm wafer because of a misalignment in the photolithography stepper.
Insider tip
Wafers are extremely brittle. A tiny scratch on the edge can cause the entire disk to shatter under the thermal stress of a processing furnace.
Also heard as
- slice