About semiconductors

About semi-
conductors

This page introduces what semiconductors are, how they are made, and why they matter. The content and glossary are based on the work of The European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA).

Semiconductors: The invisible
backbone of modern life

From smartphones to solar panels, from medical devices to connected cars – semiconductors make it all possible. Often invisible but always essential, they are the building blocks behind our digital world, driving innovation, sustainability, and the technologies that shape our future.

Semiconductor industry Q&A

From smartphones to solar panels, from medical devices to connected cars – semiconductors make it all possible. Often invisible but always essential, they are the building blocks behind our digital world, driving innovation, sustainability, and the technologies that shape our future.

Semiconductors power everything from healthcare to renewable energy, mobility, and digital communication – they are the building blocks of modern society.

Semiconductors are the foundation of devices and systems that power today’s society. Although often invisible, they are essential to our everyday lives and a sustainable future. They provide the key enabling technology for thousands of products we use every day.

In life-critical healthcare, semiconductors are essential for providing the power, precision, and reliability needed to deliver safe and effective treatment. Devices rely on semiconductors for precise electrical stimulation and control.

In modern and sustainable agriculture, semiconductors enable everything from precision farming to automated irrigation systems, allowing for increased productivity, reduced waste, and a minimised environmental impact.

Modern, state-of-the-art infrastructure, including the provision and distribution of drinking water, rely on semiconductors-powered control systems for managing large-scale water supply networks.

Semiconductors facilitate an expansion of renewable energy use, playing a central role in wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, or heat pumps. Smarter electricity grids enable reductions of CO2 emissions in buildings and ultimately shifting towards a low carbon economy.

Among the more obvious examples, semiconductors are at the core of any computer, tablet, mobile phone, or smart wearable device, allowing for ever increasing processing performances and changing the way people work, communicate, and consume media. They also ensure cyber secure solutions with ubiquitous connectivity using those devices.

Today’s smart home appliances, from fridges to cooking devices, home entertainment systems, and vacuum cleaning robots, also require semiconductors to function efficiently. Due to the world’s consistent push towards a more digital life, most home appliances now contain semiconductors to provide the enhancements.

Semiconductors facilitate the ongoing shift from traditional vehicles to greener, safer, and smarter mobility solutions: focussing on connectivity, in-vehicle entertainment, autonomous driving, electrification, functional safety and security, as well as low-carbon mobility. While a car with a combustion engine contains about 1,600 different semiconductors, the amount easily doubles in electric vehicles is only increasing as mobility moves to electrification.

Secure, connected payment solutions like banking cards, smartphones, and wearables enables us to effortlessly pay for goods and services, creating greater flexibility for retailers and consumers. Likewise, electronic passports and identity cards change and simplify how citizens interact with authorities.

Semiconductors also propel striking advancements in technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, running their calculations in different ways to the processors we have gotten used to.

In industrial settings, semiconductors drive factory automation in manufacturing, as well as more efficient power and energy management through grid energy generation, distribution and consumption metering.

In short, semiconductors are strategically important building blocks of modern life. Without them, much of it would come to a halt.

A semiconductor is a material, like silicon, that can both conduct and resist electricity – making it the foundation of all modern electronics.

First and foremost, a semiconductor is a material, such as silicon, which has certain properties of conducting or resisting electrical currents.

Those properties can be used to amplify or switch electronic signals, creating atomic-size electrical switches (also called transistors). Their key function is the ability to control the flow of electrical currents.

Semiconductors can control electrical currents, emit light, store and compute data, or mix and transform signals. They come in numerous different forms, such as microprocessors, memory chips, sensors, LEDs and many more.

💡 A modern transistor is 10.000 times thinner than a human hair. There are up to 100 billion transistors on a high-end processor today.

Chipmaking is one of the most advanced manufacturing processes in the world, transforming sand into silicon wafers through hundreds of precision steps.

Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex manufacturing process that exists today and requires hundreds of production steps to change the raw semiconducting material into useful devices. At the most basic level, silicon is converted from sand to an ultra-high purity level. The refined material is melted into cylindrical crystals (called ingots) and sliced into half-a-millimetre thick wafers with diameters of 150, 200 or 300 mm.

These wafers are then repeatedly coated with thin layers of functional materials, patterned, and etched to create the transistor structures on them. Several hundreds of highly developed process steps are carried out and repeated. To complete the processing and to create final products, a range of additional materials, including chemicals, metals, plastics, specialty gases, and many more are needed. All these steps are essential and require highest manufacturing precision. Therefore, hundreds of tests and measurements are performed to ensure the functionality of the chip in this so-called ‘frontend’ manufacturing.

Next, the wafers are cut into individual chips, which are again assembled, packaged into multi-layered chip devices in plastic or ceramic to form a final product to protect the technology inside, and finally tested (‘backend’ manufacturing). The steps are increasingly intricate as technology advances.

💡 Purity levels of 99.9999999% or higher are required for silicon wafers and other inputs, meaning that less than 1 foreign atom per 1 billion is tolerable.

💡 A chip is likely to cross international borders some 80 times and travel 2.5 times around the globe before being finalised.

The semiconductor ecosystem is a global value chain, connecting designers, foundries, equipment makers, and integrators across industries.

Looking upstream, the semiconductor ecosystem is dependent on the availability of basic utilities such as water, natural gas, electricity, raw materials as well as chemicals, metals, plastics, specialty gases, and solvents.

The globally intertwined value chain connects a wide range of industries and sectors. The lifeblood of the ecosystem is research & development and the science of semiconductor design and manufacturing.

This knowledge can be used by companies to create device design blueprints – made with the help of dedicated software. Further, the use of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, which include software, hardware, and services, is crucial to the development process to support the definition, planning, design, implementation, verification and subsequent manufacturing of semiconductor components or chips.

Highly specialised companies develop and produce the equipment, often extremely complex, which is necessary to mass-producing semiconductor chips. 

In frontend manufacturing, companies undertake the lengthy and complex processing and testing of a wafer, including several hundreds of steps in cleanrooms. Contract manufacturers that do not design but carry out volume production for others are called foundries.

In backend manufacturing, the processed wafers are cut up into individual dices, and then assembled, packaged, and tested to create the final semiconductor chip. Assembling, packaging, and testing are often outsourced as a service to specialised firms, called OSATs (for Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly & Testing) or is done in-house by Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDMs).

IDMs are companies that do everything from design to manufacturing their own products.

Companies that only design chips are called fabless, as they do not have production facilities.

Downstream users include customers of semiconductor manufacturers who are integrating semiconductors into their final products, for example direct suppliers of final products (so-called Tier 1), Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMSs), and finally Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Semiconductors are not sold to end-users.

Semiconductor glossary

A guide to the most important terms and concepts in semiconductors — from wafers and MEMS to cutting-edge technology nodes.

The semiconductor ecosystem covers a globe-spanning value chain of highly specialised capabilities. 

The planned amount of time between the entry of an order for semiconductors by a customer (like an original equipment manufacturer or chip designer) and the delivery of the ordered product following the highly complex manufacturing, testing, and packaging processes. Lead times may vary for different types of semiconductors, and usually ranged between 3 to 6 months before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The quantity of goods or materials on hand to bridge periods of time where no delivery of goods and materials may take place. Such an inventory, if significant enough, may be used to counteract shortage situations, regardless of their cause, and make industry sectors more resilient.

The technology node, often called as process node, node size or structure size, refers to the physical size of the transistor, usually expressed in micrometres (µm) and nanometres (nm). For several technology generations, the metrical unit no longer corresponds to the actual physical transistor size and are instead used as a commercial name.

Today, technology nodes are broadly divided into two groups:

  • Mature technologies: Mature node sizes generally range from 1.2 µm to 28 nm and may withstand demanding environmental conditions such as higher voltages and currents. Mature nodes make up a significant share of the global chip demand and will continue to do so for the next 10-15 years.
  • Advanced technologies: Advanced node sizes tend to refer to 16 nm and smaller. They have significant data processing capabilities and are used for personal computers and as high-performance processors.

Examples: The range of technologies used for products and devices differ widely in the technology employed and the application it is used for:

10 nm and smaller: “computer chips”
Used in computer chips and high-performance processors for areas that necessitate particularly fast data processing. Applications include the latest generation of personal computers & smartphones, but also fields such as 6G base stations, autonomous driving, medical science, or machine learning in industrial manufacturing.

16-40 nm: Microcontrollers & microprocessors
Microcontrollers and microprocessors manufactured in the 16-40 nm range make up a significant share of the global chip demand, with forecasts indicating continued and growing demand for the next 10-15 years at least. These semiconductors have sufficient computing power to be used in a wide variety of applications, such as Industry 4.0, health devices, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, power management (incl. for automotive applications), radar, mobile communications, consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products, etc.

90 nm and larger: Sensors, actuators, and controllers
Reliability in more demanding environmental conditions cannot be achieved with too small structure sizes. Where higher voltages and currents must be operated and controlled, more “robust” technologies come to pass. For instance, high-voltage analogue mixed-signal complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies with structure sizes between 65 nm and 1.2 µm are considered cutting edge in their respective applications.

1-100 µm: MEMS
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are mechanically movable silicon structures manufactured on wafers. MEMS are used as sensors, but also as actuators. Progress in MEMS is measured in functional parameters as accuracy, offset stability, and robustness. Application areas include automotive, IoT, health, as well as industrial applications.

Generally referring to the latest or most advanced stage in the development of something, the term may be utilised for a wide range of semiconductor products depending on their application area. While the 5 nm commercial name is often named as the current cutting-edge for semiconductors, this is only true for mobile and high-performance computing applications. For instance, node sizes between 65 nm and 1.2 µm are considered cutting-edge for high-voltage analogue mixed-signal complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies in certain applications

First and foremost, a semiconductor is a material, such as silicon, germanium, or gallium arsenide, that can act as an electrical conductor or insulator depending on chemical alterations or external conditions. Using these substances, an electronic device capable of controlling electrical currents, emitting light, or mixing & transforming signals, can be constructed. Such devices are also called semiconductors.

Next-generation semiconductors refer to technologies that go beyond the state of the art in offering significant improvements in computing power, power management, security, energy generation, storage, transmission and efficiency, as well as other significant energy and environmental gains.

Wafers are circular disks made of a semiconductor material, usually with a diameter of 200 or 300 millimetres and as thin as 0.6 to 0.8 mm. A series of processes then applies and defines transistors, conductors, and other structures to achieve the desired circuit. Subsequently, the wafer is sliced into dice, which are mounted in packages.

Frontend manufacturing describes the first part of the lengthy and complex process to produce a semiconductor. It describes all steps performed during wafer fabrication and probing and may include several hundreds of process steps. Generally, it starts with the blank semiconductor wafer and ends with verifying the functionality of the finished product.

Backend manufacturing describes the second part of semiconductor production, starting with dicing the wafer into individual dies. The delicate dies will then be protected by attaching them and wiring them up to a substrate. The backend processes end with packaging and sealing the die into special moulds.

Discrete semiconductor devices perform a single function, such as that of a transistor or a diode.

Optoelectronics refers to technologies that enable the conversion of electric signals into light and vice-versa. Examples include optical fibres and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

Sensors may detect physical parameters such as heat, light, or sound and convert them into electrical signals that can be measured and used by an electrical or electronic system.

Actuators may produce a rotary (e.g., in an electric motor) or linear motion (e.g., in hydraulic or pneumatic systems) by converting energy and signals

Integrated circuits (ICs) are semiconductor devices that pack multiple transistors as well as other components on a single piece of semiconductor material.

There are several IC subcategories:

  • Analog IC: Analog integrated circuits can receive continuous (as opposed to binary) input signals and perform functions such as amplification, mixing, demodulation, and active filtering on the output signal.
  • Mixed-signal IC: Mixed-signal integrated circuits contain both analogue and digital circuitry on one chip, making use of both types of signals.
  • Logic IC: Logic integrated circuits receive an input signal and execute logical operations using binary values. The output signal result is another set of logical values. Examples include microprocessor units (MPUs), microcontroller units (MCUs), digital signal processor (DSPs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
  • Memory IC: Memory integrated circuits are configured to store bits of data, and have as their primary purpose the storage and retrieval of such electronic data. Examples include dynamic random access memory (DRAM), NOR Flash and NAND Flash memory.

This glossary and the questions and answers on this page are made by The European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA).