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In electronics, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) [1] is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si, silicium), used for the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in photovoltaics, to manufacture solar cells. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and upon
Wafering is the process by which a silicon crystal is made into wafers. This process is usually carried out by a multi-wire saw which cuts multiple wafers from the same crystal at the same time. These wafers are then polished to the desired degree of flatness and thickness.
Wafer fabrication is a procedure composed of many repeated sequential processes to produce complete electrical or photonic circuits on semiconductor wafers in a semiconductor device fabrication process. Examples include production of radio frequency amplifiers, LEDs, optical computer components, and microprocessors for computers. Wafer ...
A typical wafer is made out of extremely pure silicon that is grown into mono-crystalline cylindrical ingots up to 300 mm (slightly less than 12 inches) in diameter using the Czochralski process. These ingots are then sliced into wafers about 0.75 mm thick and polished to obtain a very regular and flat surface.
Both wafers and reticles can be handled by SMIF pods in a semiconductor fabrication environment. Used in lithographic tools, reticles or photomasks contain the image that is exposed on a coated wafer in one processing step of a complete integrated semiconductor manufacturing cycle. Because reticles are linked so directly with wafer processing ...
Solar cells, or photovoltaic cells (PV) for producing electric power from sunlight can be grown as thick epi wafers on a monocrystalline silicon "seed" wafer by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and then detached as self-supporting wafers of some standard thickness (e.g., 250 μm) that can be manipulated by hand, and directly substituted for wafer cells cut from monocrystalline silicon ingots.
Electronic components are built on two semiconductor wafers. One wafer is diced; the singulated dice are aligned and bonded onto die sites of the second wafer. As in the wafer-on-wafer method, thinning and TSV creation are performed either before or after bonding. Additional die may be added to the stacks before dicing. [22] Wafer-to-Wafer
Historically, the earliest microfabrication processes were used for integrated circuit fabrication, also known as "semiconductor manufacturing" or "semiconductor device fabrication". In the last two decades, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microsystems (European usage), micromachines (Japanese terminology) and their subfields have re ...