The fab

A chip is not carved: it is printed, layer upon layer, for months. On the bare wafer, a layer is deposited, coated with a light-sensitive varnish, exposed to the drawing of the circuit, dissolved where the light hit, etched, cleaned, and the cycle starts again. A modern chip stacks up to 1001 layers, aligned to the nanometre, and the road from design to production takes up to 42 months. The finest lines are drawn with light of 13.5 nm3 wavelength, almost X-rays, produced by a machine that fills a room. A single company in the world knows how to build it, in Veldhoven, in the Netherlands. The most advanced fabs are in Taiwan, around Hsinchu and Tainan.