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Material World
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Semiconductor manufacturing

The fabrication of integrated circuits, overwhelmingly on silicon wafers.

Semiconductor manufacturing builds integrated circuits by repeatedly depositing, patterning and etching layers on a single crystal silicon wafer. It has probably the most demanding material purity requirements of any industry: contamination is measured in parts per billion, and a single particle in the wrong place ruins a die.

It is a useful illustration of how far a material's value can be separated from its abundance. Silicon is a quarter of the crust; the wafers are worth what they are because of what has been done to them.

Medium confidence Weak evidence checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • Silicon — element
  • Gallium arsenide — compound · the compound semiconductor industry, which is a separate business from silicon with its own fabs and its own economics
  • Indium tin oxide — material · as the transparent electrode of every flat panel display and capacitive touchscreen
  • Czochralski process — process · the first step of it — every wafer in the industry begins as a slice of a boule
  • Vapour deposition — process · every conducting and insulating layer inside an integrated circuit is deposited, because none of them can be placed any other way
  • Optical fibre — material · the preform and the drawing tower are vapour-deposition equipment, and the industry grew out of the same processes
  • PEEK — material · wafer handling components, where purity and low outgassing matter more than strength
  • Gallium nitride — compound · and its commercial breakthrough was a manufacturing one: learning to grow it on silicon wafers let it be made in existing fabs instead of on small expensive sapphire
  • Polysilicon — material · at eleven nines for electronics against six to nine for solar, which are different products from the same process run harder

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Semiconductor manufacturing back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses → Silicon → is produced by (carbothermic reduction of silica with coke in a submerged arc furnace, which is smelting in the strict sense even though no ore is involved) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation → takes as input (the feedstock, and an unusual one in being free, unlimited and available anywhere — the cost is entirely the energy to liquefy it) → Air
  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses (the compound semiconductor industry, which is a separate business from silicon with its own fabs and its own economics) → Gallium arsenide → is produced by (grown as a boule and sliced, though it is harder to keep stoichiometric than silicon because the arsenic evaporates) → Czochralski process → takes as input (charged to the crucible already refined; the process changes its arrangement and its purity, not its identity) → Silicon → is produced by (carbothermic reduction of silica with coke in a submerged arc furnace, which is smelting in the strict sense even though no ore is involved) → Smelting → takes as input (roasted to drive off sulfur, then reduced to copper) → Chalcopyrite
  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses (the first step of it — every wafer in the industry begins as a slice of a boule) → Czochralski process → takes as input (charged to the crucible already refined; the process changes its arrangement and its purity, not its identity) → Silicon → is produced by (carbothermic reduction of silica with coke in a submerged arc furnace, which is smelting in the strict sense even though no ore is involved) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation
  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses (the preform and the drawing tower are vapour-deposition equipment, and the industry grew out of the same processes) → Optical fibre → is produced by (drawn from a preform of ultrapure fused silica, at a purity where a kilometre of it is as clear as a window pane) → Glass melting → takes as input (as the stabiliser, and without it a soda-silica glass would slowly dissolve in water) → Limestone → is sourced from (precipitated from it, mostly by organisms building shells and skeletons out of dissolved calcium and carbonate) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses (wafer handling components, where purity and low outgassing matter more than strength) → PEEK → is produced by (a step-growth polymerisation between aromatic monomers at high temperature in a polar solvent) → Polymerisation → takes as input (as vinyl chloride, which is why more than half of PVC's weight is salt rather than oil) → Chlorine → is produced by (at the anode) → Chlor-alkali electrolysis → takes as input (as brine; the salt is the feedstock for both products at once) → Halite
  • Semiconductor manufacturing → uses (and its commercial breakthrough was a manufacturing one: learning to grow it on silicon wafers let it be made in existing fabs instead of on small expensive sapphire) → Gallium nitride → is sourced from (produced overwhelmingly in China, which introduced export controls in 2023 — a vulnerability that comes from the metal being somebody else's by-product rather than from any scarcity) → Gallium → is sourced from (as a by-product of the Bayer process) → Bauxite → is sourced from (the residue of prolonged tropical weathering, which strips the silica and alkalis out of an aluminosilicate rock and leaves the aluminium behind — basalt is one common parent among several) → Basalt → is composed of (an early-crystallising constituent of basaltic magma) → Olivine

These are the most distinct paths back. Semiconductor manufacturing can be traced through others besides.