Making Silicon Chips

From Sand to Circuits

The surprising process behind Intel® technology

The world’s most advanced manufacturing

Today silicon chips are everywhere. Intel creates industry-leading and world-first silicon products. These Intel chips are some of the most complex devices ever manufactured, requiring advanced manufacturing technology. Step into a modern "fab" where Intel makes its chips, and you’ll discover a range of sophisticated processes spanning close to a million square feet of space.

Driving all forms of digital innovation

Intel chips power Ultrabook™ devices, smartphones, tablets, high performance computing, data centers and the internet. They automate factories, 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. Each of these transistors acts as an on/off switch, controlling the flow of electricity through the chip to send, receive, and process information . Chips today may have multiple cores.
Explore silicon technology and manufacturing >

Silicon

Silicon, the principal ingredient in beach sand, is a natural semiconductor and the most abundant element on earth except for oxygen.

Wafers

To make wafers, silicon is purified, melted and cooled to form an ingot, which is then sliced into discs called wafers. Chips are built simultaneously in a grid formation on the wafer surface in a fabrication facility or “fab.”

Chips

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.

Clean rooms

Chips are fabricated in batches of wafers in clean rooms that are thousands of times cleaner than hospital operating rooms.