Every phone, computer, car and washing machine contains chips. The most advanced chip in your phone holds billions of transistors, tiny switches each thousands of times thinner than a hair. How is something like that even made? The answer is one of the most complex and expensive processes humanity has developed.
It all starts with sand, or more precisely silicon, extracted from quartz sand and purified to near perfection. From molten silicon a huge cylindrical crystal is grown and sliced into thin round discs about 30 centimeters across, called wafers. Hundreds of chips will be built on each one. The work is done in clean rooms whose air is thousands of times cleaner than an operating room, because a single speck of dust can ruin a chip.
The heart of the process is lithography, 'photographing' the chip's pattern onto the wafer. The wafer is coated with light-sensitive material and light is shone through a mask containing the pattern, a bit like developing an old-fashioned photo. Advanced fabs use extreme ultraviolet light at a tiny wavelength to draw extremely fine lines. Then come etching, adding layers of material, polishing, and again. An advanced chip goes through hundreds of such steps over several months.
At every step everything must be checked for accuracy, and that is where Israel comes in. Systems that measure the thickness and shape of layers, like Nova's of Rehovot, and systems that look for defects, like Camtek's of Migdal HaEmek, are an essential part of every fab. Giants such as Applied Materials and KLA also develop such equipment in Israel. And there are fabs in Israel: Tower makes chips in Migdal HaEmek, and Intel runs a manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat.
Why is it so expensive? An advanced fab costs tens of billions of dollars, a single advanced lithography machine costs hundreds of millions, and only a few companies in the world, led by Taiwan's TSMC, Samsung and Intel, can make the most advanced chips. That is why chips have become geopolitical, and why a memory shortage or disruption in Taiwan is immediately felt in device prices worldwide.
