What makes up a microchip

Computerworld QuickStudies Silicon is a natural semiconductor. Under some conditions, it conducts electricity; under others, it acts as an insulator. Silicon's electrical properties can be altered by the addition of impurities, a process called doping.

These characteristics make it an ideal material for making transistors, which are simple devices that amplify electrical signals. Several types of microchips are made today. Microprocessors are logic chips that perform the computations inside most commercial computers. Memory chips store information. Digital signal processors convert between analog and digital signals QuickLink: a Application-specific integrated circuits are special-purpose chips used in things such as cars and appliances.

Chips are made in multibillion-dollar fabrication plants called fabs. Fabs melt and refine sand to produce Saws slice the ingots into wafers about as thick as a dime and several inches in diameter. The wafers are cleaned and polished, and each one is used to build multiple chips. Please consider upgrading to the latest version of your browser by clicking one of the following links.

Today silicon chips are everywhere. Intel creates industry-leading and world-first silicon products. They automate factories and are embedded in automobiles and everyday devices. The most sophisticated processor can contain hundreds of millions or billions of transistors interconnected by fine wires made of copper.

Chips today may have multiple cores. Silicon, the principal ingredient in beach sand, is a natural semiconductor and the most abundant element on Earth except for oxygen.

To make wafers, silicon is purified, melted, and cooled to form an ingot, which is then sliced into discs called wafers. A chip is a complex device that forms the brains of every computing device. While chips look flat, they are three-dimensional structures and may include as many as 30 layers of complex circuitry.

Chips are fabricated in batches of wafers in clean rooms that are thousands of times cleaner than hospital operating rooms. Fab technicians wear special suits, nicknamed bunny suits, designed to keep contaminants such as lint and hair off the wafers during chip manufacturing.

Design specifications that include chip size, number of transistors, testing, and production factors are used to create schematics—symbolic representations of the transistors and interconnections that control the flow of electricity though a chip. It is plugged in to a socket on a printed circuit board to connect it to other components. Each kind of microchip performs a different task, and is identified by a code number.

Some microchips work with analog signals a microchip with code is an analog amplifier. Others work with digital signals? Microchips are made by building up electronic circuits in a tiny wafer slice or pure silicon in a complicated layer-by-layer process. The different circuit components are produced by doping treating areas of the silicon with different chemicals.