How a chip is made, in ten minutes

A modern chip starts as ordinary sand and ends as billions of transistors working in concert. In between are hundreds of precisely controlled steps. Here's the whole journey at a high level — each stage links to a deeper explainer.

From sand to wafer

High-purity silica is reduced to metallurgical-grade silicon, then refined to electronic-grade polysilicon. A single crystal is grown from the melt and sliced into thin, mirror-polished wafers — the substrate every chip is built on.

Building the transistors

Inside the fab, the wafer cycles through deposit → pattern → etch → dope → planarize, hundreds of times. Lithography defines the smallest features; etching transfers them; doping creates the transistor regions; and interconnect wiring ties everything together.

Test, cut, package, test again

Finished wafers are tested die-by-die, diced into individual chips, packaged to protect and connect them, and tested once more before they ship. Packaging is increasingly where performance is won as transistor scaling slows.

Want the step-by-step version? Walk the interactive Manufacturing Explorer, or follow the whole value chain in the Supply Chain Explorer.