What Materials are Used to Make Computer Chips?

What are the constituent materials of the chip?

Silicon is mainly refined from quartz sand, wafers are silicon elements to be purified (99.999%), followed by the pure silicon made of silicon wafers, become the material for the manufacture of integrated circuits quartz semiconductor, will be sliced is the chip production specific wafers required. The thinner the wafer, the lower the cost of production, but the higher the requirements of the process.

Some people may ask, there are so many semiconductors, why would choose silicon to produce chips? In fact, the main reasons for choosing silicon as the raw material for chips are the following：

1. Silicon is the second most abundant element on earth, it is easy to find the raw material for purification, and silicon-related treatment process has been developed for decades, which is very mature compared to other elements.

2. Silicon is cheap and easy to promote.

3. Silicon is chemically stable, so the stability of the manufactured chip is also stronger.

However, due to the recent global shortage of semiconductors, some companies have started to use gallium nitride instead of silicon as the raw material for chips.

Gallium nitride has a wider band gap than silicon, so its devices have smaller transistors and shorter currents, and its ultra-low resistance and capacitance can increase the speed significantly. Gallium nitride is more advantageous than silicon in the manufacturing of RF devices and power electronics devices and can be used to manufacture the high-frequency radio wave pulse chipset used in 5G technology, and the heat resistance of gallium nitride is also higher than silicon.

Chip classification

There are many classifications of chips, which can be divided into two types of analog chips and digital chips according to different processing signals. In simple terms, analog chips use the amplification of transistors, while digital analog chips use the switching role of the crystal. Specifically, analog chips are used to generate, amplify and process a variety of analog signals, and there are many different types, including analog-to-digital converter chips (ADC), amplifier chips, power management chips, PLLs and so on. The difficulty of analog chip design is that there are too many non-ideal effects, requiring solid basic knowledge and extensive experience, such as small signal analysis, time domain frequency domain analysis, and so on.

In contrast, digital chips are used to generate, amplify and process various digital signals, digital chips generally carry out logic operations, CPU, memory chips and DSP chips are digital chips. The difficulty of digital chip design is that the chip scale is large and the process requirements are complex, so it usually requires multiple teams to work together to develop.

CPU is the central processing unit, which is the core of computing and control of a computer system and is the final execution unit for information processing and program operation. The CPU is the core hardware unit that controls the deployment of all hardware resources of the computer (such as memory, input and output units) and performs general-purpose operations.

According to different application scenarios to classification, the chip can be divided into a civilian grade (consumer grade), industrial grade, automotive grade, military-grade chips, their main difference or in the working temperature range. Military-grade chips due to the complex war environment, the use of electronic devices to be durable enough, such as missiles, satellites, tanks, and aircraft carriers inside the electronic components, any part out are the most advanced, 10 years ahead of industrial grade, about 20 years ahead of commercial grade, the most expensive and most sophisticated are reflected in the military grade, the working temperature in -55 ℃ ~ +150 ℃; automotive-grade chips Operating temperature range -40 ℃ ~ +125 ℃; industrial grade chip than the automotive grade a little lower grade, the price is the second most expensive, the second most precise, the working temperature range in -40 ℃ ~ +85 ℃; civilian / consumer grade chip is the kind of market transactions, computers, cell phones, you can see are basically commercial. But the quality of the product also differs, such as Microsoft to do the chip even if the commercial grade in the military-grade, the cheapest price, the most common and most practical, the operating temperature range in 0 ℃ ~ +70 ℃.