Segment
Wafer fabrication: building transistors layer by layer
A fab takes a polished silicon disc and, over roughly two to three months and several hundred process steps, builds billions of transistors and the wiring between them. This is where the capital is, where the yield is won or lost, and where the equipment industry sells its tools.
In one sentence
Wafer fabrication is the sequence of patterning, deposition, etch, implant and polish steps that construct transistors and interconnect on a silicon wafer.
The process is a loop. Deposit a film, pattern it with lithography, etch away what the pattern does not protect, clean, measure, and repeat — sixty to a hundred times for a modern logic chip, each cycle adding one layer of the structure. The transistors are built first, in the lowest layers; the ten or more levels of metal wiring that connect them come after.
Two properties determine whether a fab is competitive. Resolution decides what can be built. Yield decides how much of it works — and because a single fatal defect ruins a die, yield is dominated by particle contamination and process variation, not by design. A fab is in large part a machine for keeping things clean and stable.
The economics follow from the capital. A leading-edge fab costs well into the tens of billions of dollars and depreciates fast, so it must run at high utilisation continuously. That is why capacity decisions are made years ahead of demand and why the industry's cycles are as violent as they are.
How this breaks down
Split by the physical operation being performed on the wafer.
- PhotolithographyThe step that defines what a process node can build, and the industry's tightest single supplier concentration.Breaks down into: EUV lithography · DUV immersion · Masks and pellicles9 pages belowChokepoint
- CMPPolishing the wafer between layers, and why nothing above ten layers of wiring works without it.Definition pageChokepoint
- Deposition and etchThe steps that actually build the structure the lithography step only outlined.Breaks down into: Thin-film deposition · Atomic layer deposition · Plasma etch3 pages belowChokepoint
- Transistor architectureHow the switch itself has been restructured three times to keep scaling working.Definition page
- Nodes and yieldWhat node names do and do not mean, and why defect density decides the economics.Definition page
What this depends on
1 of these is marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
- Supply chainChokepoint
Silicon wafers
The starting substrate, made to extreme flatness and purity by a handful of suppliers.
Silicon wafers - Supply chain
Ultrapure water, power and gases
A large fab consumes utility volumes comparable to a small city's, continuously and without interruption.
Specialty gases - Supply chain
Immersion exposure capacity
Most layers on every wafer, and every layer on a trailing-edge product, are printed on 193 nanometre immersion scanners. A fab short of them cannot run whatever else it has.
DUV immersion
What depends on this
Other pages in this map that name Wafer fabrication as something they cannot do without.
- Semiconductors · Advanced packagingInterposers and 2.5DInterposers consume fab capacity of their own, in addition to the wafers used for the dies mounted on them.
- Artificial intelligence · AI networkingOptical interconnectThe modulators and waveguides are patterned on silicon in a conventional fab, on mature nodes rather than leading ones. Only the lasers come from a different kind of line.
- Semiconductors · Test and assemblyTest interface hardwareHigh-count probe cards use contact structures made with wafer processes rather than assembled by hand, so the leading edge of this hardware depends on fab capacity of its own.
- Artificial intelligenceAI computeEvery part in this branch is manufactured on the most advanced nodes available.
- SemiconductorsFoundry and capacityA fab is a building full of tools whose delivery times are measured in quarters to years; that sets how fast capacity can respond.
Companies across Wafer fabrication
Every company named on a step below this page, ordered by how many of those steps it appears at. Compiled from the pages themselves rather than written separately, so the two cannot disagree. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
- Carl Zeiss SMTPrivate3 steps
- ASM InternationalAmsterdam2 steps
38 more companies appear at a single step each; they are named on the pages for those steps.
How these pages are written
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.
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