For those who are not familiar with the semiconductor industry, or those who have just entered the semiconductor industry, do they often hear the words “wafer”, “chip”, and “chip”? What is the relationship between these words and the “chip” that we hang on to every day?

Let's start with wafers:

Wafers are silicon wafers used in the semiconductor industry. Extremely pure polycrystalline silicon is dissolved and doped into silicon crystals, which are then slowly pulled out to form cylindrical monocrystalline silicon, commonly known as silicon ingots.

Silicon ingots polished into silicon rods, and then after grinding, polishing, slicing, it becomes silicon wafers, which are the most basic raw materials used in the manufacture of chips, i.e., the chip's “base”, a piece of wafer can produce many of the same size chips.

Wafers come in different sizes, with the most mainstream currently being 8-inch and 12-inch diameter wafers.

The difference between a die and a chip is mainly that they are forms of different parts of the chip manufacturing process.

A die, also called a bare chip, is an individual unit on top of a wafer after it has completed the manufacturing process. Bad die will be eliminated, and the remaining die will be cut, packaged, and become a chip.

The die itself has a complete circuit that contains the core functionality of the chip, but it has to be packaged before it can be integrated into the device to interact with other modules of the device and realize its own functionality.

Thus, die focuses more on the physical form of the chip and emphasizes a stage in the chip manufacturing process, while chip is a more colloquial and widely used term that focuses more on the functionality and application of the chip.

  (Original:：Chip News)