Name : Parveen Bangotra

E Mail : [email protected]

From Sand to Silicon

- the Fascinating World of Semiconductors
Mankind has always been and shall ever remain in search of improved quality of life and
thereby products that are better in performance, high in quality, cheaper in price and
perhaps smaller in size. This is what drives the industries world over, to spend millions
and millions on Research and Development to produce new products that beat their
own products in terms of price and performance. A race without an end. A true
competitive world.

Say, the search for an Ideal System that has the following features:

 It occupies very less space

 It weighs less
 It can operate at high speed
 It requires very less power
 It is highly reliable
 It is modular in construction
 It is not expensive

Silicon Chip ( VLSI – Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit ) meets or at least is nearer to
these criteria and that is what makes VLSI so important. Silicon has a unique property, it
can change the flow of electricity passing through it by a process called DOPING. That
is, depending upon the doping, it may conduct electricity through it or may act as
insulator thereby not allowing the electricity to flow through it. Hence the name
Semiconductor.

It is this unique property of silicon that today every human activity - be it leisure, sports,
entertainment, travel, study, welfare, warfare, science or even art, everything revolves
around this VLSI or so called silicon chip. Ever since the invention of the first chip in the
year 1958, more and more electronics is being integrated into smallest possible size. So
you have world of miniaturized mobile phones, pen cameras, watches, laptop and palm
top computers and what not. And this surely is not the end of miniaturization. There is
and shall ever remain a need for better VLSI techniques to give us better products.

What is after all this VLSI - which has also and rightly been called by someone as the
crude oil of Twenty First Century because VLSI chip is the nerve center for all electronic
system - be it defense, space, telecom or industrial systems.

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And, what is the raw material for such a revolutionary product?

SAND.

More than 90% of the earth's crust is composed of Silica

(Silicon Dioxide - SiO2) or Silicate. Next to oxygen, silicon is
most abundant element on earth’s crust. When sand glitters in
sunlight, that's silica. For the purpose of VLSI or Silicon Chip,
Silicon required should be monocrystalline with precise uniform
chemical characteristics. With carefully selected pure sand,
98% pure or better silicon is obtained by chemical process of
reduction i.e. removal of oxygen from sand. However, this is
not enough. Using highly complex chemical & mechanical
processes, this is further purified to bring impurities below the
parts-per-billion level. Now a days, a high level of purity
(99.999999999% eleven nines), has been attained.
This purified silicon is in the shape of Cylindrical Ingot having
perfect monocystalline structure having same crystal
orientation. Using a highly precision saw, this ingot is cut into
Silicon Wafers.

Today almost all the electronic chips are made on Silicon

Wafer. Silicon wafer when converted to semiconductor chips or
also called integrated circuits contains numerous electrical
pathways, which connect thousands or even millions of
transistors and other electronic components. These transistors
store information on the semiconductors, either by holding an
electrical charge or by holding little or no charge. This function
of transistor of “holding an electric charge” or “not holding an
electric charge” correspondence to the function of “Electric
Switch”. Therefore, at the very basic level, a transistor is a
Switch which can be turned “ON” or “OFF” which
correspondence to “1” or “0”. A world of ONE’s and ZERO’s.
While in our day today life, we deal with decimal world of 0 to 9,
Digital world is binary - that is only 0 and 1. Every character be
it numerical or alphabetic or punctuation or any other character
is encoded as a sequence of ONE’s and ZERO’s. For
example the number “7” in binary shall be written as 00000111.
And alphabet “B” shall be written as 01000010 and “b” shall be
written as 01100010. The Digital World is that of 0’s and 1’s or
one can say OFF and ON- that is the behavior of a normal
switch. A switch can be “OFF” or “ON” and the digital world is
the world of switching. This is a method of working with all
types of digital circuitry, including integrated circuit gates and
circuits based on physical switch contacts. This is Binary
Mathematics – a language on which the modern
microelectronics is based.

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In the year 1947, solid state TRANSISTOR ( with

switching capability) was invented at Bell Telephone
Laboratories followed by Schockley’s bipolar junction
Transistor in the year 1949. First Integrated Circuit –
IC, in which all components were integrated on a
single semiconductor
substrate, was conceived by
Jack Kilby at Texas
Instruments in the year 1958.
Jack Kilby was awarded the
Nobel prize for this
breakthrough. There has
been no looking back ever
since- the revolution of
cramming more and more
transistors on a single chip
has moved from Electronics
to Microelectronics and now
to Nano Technology.

By the year 1965, rapid developments in the

Integrated Circuit led Gordon Moore, a young scientist
at the Fairchild Semiconductors to make an
observation in a magazine that “The number of
components on an integrated circuit was doubling
roughly every 18 months with a commensurate
reduction in cost per component.”

Although an observation in a magazine article more

than 45 years ago, this holds true even today and has
universally come to be known as “Moore’s Law”. From
2500 transistors per Integrated Circuit in the year
1972, this exponential growth reached 1,70,00,00,000
transistors per Integrated Circuit by the year 2004
thereby making electronic systems- faster, better and
cheaper.

As per Semiconductor Industry Association ( SIA)

report-

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In the year 2004, more transistors were produced and at a lower

cost than grains of rice.
How is VLSI made? Very broadly speaking, the process of VLSI development can be
divided into VLSI Design and VLSI Fabrication. Whereas VLSI fabrication is highly
sophisticated, expensive and largely automated, it is the VLSI Design which holds the
key for success of VLSI.

The process of VLSI Design involves extensive use of EDA (Electronic Design
Automation) software to design circuits from an idea or a concept or an existing
electronic system. While most Chip Designers will never be confronted with the details
of the chip manufacturing process, some insight and understanding of the chip
manufacturing is important.

Interface between Design (Chip Designer) & chip manufacturing (Process Engineer –
the one who is to process the wafer ) is an Optical Mask. These Optical Masks can be
thought of as a stencil. These Masks define the patterns, that when transcribed as
various layers on semiconductor material, would form the electronic devices and
connecting wires. These patterns on the Masks have to strictly adhere to some
constrains like minimum width and distance. These are called Design Rules. If a
Designer adheres to these Rules, he gets a guarantee that his circuit will be
manufacturable.

While a Chip Designer would like to make a

tighter, smaller design to pack more and more
transistors, Process Engineer has to ensure that
Design is manufacturable with high yield and
reproducibility. Therefore, the Design engineer
and Process Engineer has to work in close
coordination strictly adhering to Design Rules.

VLSI Design is an extremely important function

in the whole process of VLSI fabrication. It is
more so because of the formidable cost of VLSI
Fabrication. A poor VLSI design can result in cost
and time overruns thereby jeopardizing a
complete project. Therefore the foremost
objective of VLSI designer should be to get
working silicon the first time. Elimination of logic design errors, timing errors and design
flaws are to be achieved with a high degree of confidence before the design is sent for
chip fabrication. And whereas VLSI fabrication is a highly automated process and works
in batch mode to produce devices in volumes, VLSI Design is manual process. Therein
lies the importance of VLSI Design Engineer. Highly in demand the world over, VLSI
Design Engineers is the force behind the electronic revolution. They are the ones, who

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 Name : Parveen Bangotra
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have written the success stories of the miniaturized electronic world - be it mobile
phone, micro camera, computers, printers, DVDs watches or washing machines.

The process of VLSI Fabrication is a highly complex process carried out under
extremely stringent parameters of temperature, humidity, cleanliness and infrastructure
stability. When you are dealing with 0.6 or 0.8 micron, (One Micron = One Thousandths
of a Millimeter Or App. One hundredth of a Human Hair Diameter) even a speck of dust
or a little vibration can create havoc with the process.

Reducing the size of chip structures leads to faster chips, lower power consumption and
reduced heat dissipation. In smaller circuits, the electrons travel shorter distances
between components on the core resulting in faster processing. Fewer electrons flow
through smaller circuits requiring less current to carry signals. This enables the chip to
operate at a lower voltage resulting in lower power consumption or longer battery life.

However, there are limits to size reduction. The wavelength of ultraviolet light used in
current lithography is 0.248 microns, the same measure as today's 0.25-micron chip
circuits. With some adjustments in the equipment, ultraviolet light can produce circuits
as thin as 0.18-microns. For smaller geometries electron beam and even X-ray
lithography is being used for producing smaller circuits.

Although the complete VLSI fabrication process is a highly complex in nature, one can
attempt to divide this in following basic steps:

1st Step:
Silicon wafer is heated in an oxygen rich furnace so that a
layer of silicon oxide is formed on the top surface of wafer.

2nd Step:
A thin coating of photographic emulsion is applied over the
oxidized surface of the wafer. This is followed by a dry and
bake stage so that the photographic emulsion also known
as photoresist becomes hardened.

3rd Step:
At this stage VLSI Design Input is used to make
Optical Masks. Fundamental building block of a VLSI
Design is a TRANSISTOR. These Optical Masks can
be thought of as a stencil having transparent and
opaque regions that define the doping regions to build
transistors; connecting routes; cross connections etc.
Depending upon circuit design, there could be 10-20
photomasks to be used. Through a chain of process,

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optical reticle is generated which is further processed to generate working photomasks.
These masks are used in Wafer Fabrication for selective etching of silicon wafer.
Photomask is aligned with the wafer and is exposed to light so that photoresist surface
of the wafer gets selectively exposed and developed as per the photomask design.

4th Step:
A highly sophisticated chemical process selectively
etches the surface of the wafer leaving behind the parts
that are masked by the resist material. When the
required etch depth is achieved the wafer is stripped of
the resist and washed clean.

This process is repeated for successive masking layers

typically 10 to 20 times for a CMOS process.

5th Step:
Since the complete Integrated Circuit is made up of the transistors. Now the transistors
have to be formed on the silicon wafer. This is achieved by a process known as Doping.
By doping the conduction / resistance of the silicon wafer is modified so that transistors
can be formed.

6th Step:
In order to produce a functional circuit, the transistors formed by Doping are to be
interconnected. This is achieved by depositing fine wire traces made from aluminum or
copper to connect up the transistors in a correct way.

7th Step:
The processed wafer goes for testing as per the test program where each die on a
Wafer is probed and marked as good or bad die.

8th Step:
The wafer is scribed and broken into dice. Good dice go for packaging.

9th Step:
Good dice are packaged as per the packaging requirement.

While these are basic steps in VLSI Fabrication, many complex

devices such as microprocessors may require upto 400
individual process steps.

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 Name : Parveen Bangotra
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Since the fundamental building block of any VLSI Design is a TRANSISTOR. By using
the above steps, transistor is formed that can be diagrammatically depicted as below

By applying the above depicted arrangement, transistor can be switched OFF or ON.
This is the behaviour of a Switch. That is “ON” or “OFF” ; 1 or 0. That is Boolean
algebra.
The semiconductor industry produces many kinds of chips, which go into today's
electronic products. Some of these are Microprocessors which act as brains of
computers; Dynamic Random Access Memory chips (DRAMs)-these are memory chips
and can retain memory only as long as they receive power; Programmable memory
chips (EPROMs, EEPROMs, and Flash) and ASICS i.e Application Specific Integrated
Circuits i.e. Chips made for specific purpose.

References:
www.appliedmaterials.com
http://www.sia-online.org/cs/about_sia
www.iroi.sev.edu.cn
www.columbia.edu
www.ncnanotechnologiey.com
http://www.processpecialties.com/siliconp.htm
www.pcplus.techradar.com
http://pcplus.techradar.com

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