Courses
Not started 02 Chip manufacturing Crystal, cleanroom, lithography, deposition, etch, interconnect 7 lessons
Not started 03 Chip production Tape-out, masks, yield, packaging, chiplets, test, the industry 7 lessons
Not started 04 Chip types CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, FPGAs, memory, SoCs, analog and power 7 lessons
Not started 05 Beyond silicon Compound semiconductors, photonics, new materials, neuromorphic, quantum 7 lessons
Not started
How it works
Start anywhere
The courses build on each other in order, but each one stands alone. If you already know how a transistor works, start at manufacturing.
Short lessons
Every lesson is a five-minute read with the key figures pulled out, so you can come back and check a number without rereading the lesson.
Check yourself
Each course ends with eight questions. Every answer explains why, whether you got it right or not.
Progress stays with you
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Glossary
Twenty words that come up everywhere.
Short definitions for the terms the courses use most. Each one is covered properly in its lesson.
A thin, polished disc of single-crystal silicon, now usually 300 mm across, on which hundreds of chips are built at once.
One chip on a wafer, before or after it is cut out. A packaged product may contain one die or many.
An electrically controlled switch. A gate voltage decides whether current flows between source and drain. Modern chips hold billions.
Complementary metal oxide semiconductor: logic built from paired n-type and p-type transistors, so a gate draws real power only while switching.
A name for a manufacturing generation, such as “3 nm”. It no longer measures any feature on the chip.
Transistor shapes in which the gate wraps three sides of a fin (FinFET) or all sides of stacked sheets (gate-all-around), for better control at small sizes.
Printing a circuit pattern onto the wafer with light through a mask, into a light-sensitive resist. It is repeated for every layer.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography, at 13.5 nm wavelength. It prints the finest layers of leading-edge chips in a single exposure where older light needed several.
The mask that holds one layer's pattern. The area a scanner can expose at once, about 26 × 33 mm, caps the size of a single die.
The moment a finished design is handed to manufacturing to make masks. The name dates from when it went on magnetic tape.
The share of dies on a wafer that work. Larger dies and higher defect density both lower it.
A die that has passed test before packaging, so expensive packages are not built around parts that fail.
A smaller die designed to be combined with others in one package, instead of building one very large die.
A layer, often silicon, that sits under several dies and carries dense wiring between them. The basis of 2.5D packaging.
Joining two dies or wafers copper-to-copper and oxide-to-oxide with no solder, at connection pitches of a few micrometres or less.
High-bandwidth memory: DRAM dies stacked vertically and placed next to a processor on an interposer, giving very wide, very fast access.
A company that manufactures chips designed by others. A fabless company designs chips and has a foundry make them.
Outsourced semiconductor assembly and test: companies that package and test chips after the wafer leaves the fab.
The energy needed to free an electron to conduct. It decides how a semiconductor behaves with heat, voltage and light.
The unit of a quantum computer. Unlike a bit, it can hold a superposition of 0 and 1, and qubits can be entangled with one another.