hard drive or virtual hard drive such as in a storage access network if the designer does not fabricate chips or the photolithographic masks used to fabricate chips the designer transmits the resulting design by physical means e g by providing a copy of the storage medium storing the design or electronically e g through the internet to such entities directly or indirectly the stored design is then converted into the appropriate format e g gdsii for the fabrication of photolithographic masks which typically include multiple copies of the chip design in question that are to be formed on a wafer the photolithographic masks are utilized to define areas of the wafer and or the layers thereon to be etched or otherwise processed the methods described herein may be used in the fabrication of integrated circuit chips the resulting integrated circuit chips can be distributed by the fabricator in raw wafer form that is as a single wafer that has multiple unpackaged chips as a bare die or in a packaged form in the latter case the chip is mounted in a single chip package such as a plastic carrier with leads that are affixed to a motherboard or other higher level carrier or in a multichip package such as a ceramic carrier that has either or both surface interconnections or buried interconnections in any case the chip is then integrated with other chips discrete circuit elements and or other signal processing devices as part of either a an intermediate product such as a.