TSMC experimenting with rectangular wafers vs. round for more chips per wafer

No, this is panels from which interposers will be made. Which are now larger than chips and rectangular, so wasted edges from a 300mm wafer are high. The proposed size is much larger than chip-grade ingots.

They don't need perfect silicon. It can be grown on a continuous ribbon which is sliced into panel sizes like they do for solar cells. If they need a perfect surface they can deposit some pure Si to finish it. Maybe we will eventually see that replace ingots for chip grade.

On a lighter note, this is actually a career threatening news for me. So much of my job is to figure out what to do with the end of the round wafer (partial dies), that I can't imagine what my whole department will do if we go for rectangular wafers :'). Made me realize how specific my engineering has been for the last 5 years.

> It takes the deep pockets of chipmakers like TSMC to push equipment makers to change equipment designs.

I presume Apple invests in a lot of the capital costs? Apple needs to put it's cash somewhere and they can align that with exclusive contractual access to production of leading edge CPUs.

Note that I haven't actually read anything about Apple's investment - I'm just hypothetically assuming it. We do sometimes hear about the exclusive contracts with TSMC.

Fabs got too expensive: that was why Global Foundries was spun out of AMD. Intel now has similar problems as AMD did?

My understanding is that round wafers are cheaper to produce since the silicon purification process produces cylindrical rods that are then cut into circular wafers.

With fabrication becoming more and more advanced I can see that this original cost advantage of round wafers becomes less significant compared to everything else.

The industry moved to 300mm 25 years ago. It’s going to take a lot to get off that standard.

Also, round chambers for etch and deposition are good for homogeneity. I can imagine square chambers would result in lots of process challenges.

Spin coating rectangles sucks.

Is their any blogs or videos about how these ingots are produced? The cost of blank wafers for a hobbyist is just so steep that im looking into making my own silicone blank wafers.

I suspect they're going to start with a rectangular substrate on which they'll grow Si and then high electron mobility materials.

Why not hexagons?

I thought wafers were round in part because edges get damaged or contaminated in handling, and one would not want to have a real chip on the edge be damaged that way?

They are still going to have to cut the edges off of round waffers to make them square.

The process of drawing the ingots leads to inherently round waffers. This is something that is not done by the foundary, but by a vendor.

Hexagonal chips when?

In britain theyte called chips

We’re all just wasting time until someone figures out how to make wafers into shells that nest together into spheres, right? People talk about the end of Moore’s law and such, but we’ve still got a whole other dimension to work with…

Gosh, if they let me handle this chip design stuff, I’d have it figured out in no time! Looks easy.