In the shadow of major semiconductor manufacturers, a little-known but crucial company called Applied Materials has plied its trade for almost 45 years. Inside every Intel, GlobalFoundries, and TSMC silicon chip foundry, there are Applied Materials machines performing some of the finest handiwork known to man. It isn’t just chips, either: Applied provide the systems that enable Samsung and LG to make LCD displays, and Suntech and JA Solar to create photovoltaic solar power cells. Basically, if a company deals in silicon wafers, it’s almost guaranteed that Applied Materials equipment governs most or all of the fabrication process.

“The vast majority of chips in operation today have been through an Applied’s machine at least once. This includes memory, logic and other types of chips produced by integrated device manufacturers and foundries,” CTO Klaus Scheugraf told us in an interview.

To put a finer point on it, when Intel announces that it has reached 22nm, it has done so using Applied Materials equipment. This isn’t to say that Intel’s achievement is any less awesome, but it’s important that we draw a line in the sand before we go any further. Applied Materials provides the tools, but it is down to Intel to make the most of them through chemistry tweaks and chip design. It’s also important to note that AMD, Samsung, and TSMC all have access to the same tools. Applied Materials works closely with manufacturers to customize their solutions, but more on that later.

How is a silicon chip made?

If, like me, you thought that making a CMOS circuit is mostly a matter of lithographically etching paths onto a silicon wafer with a laser, you’re in for a surprise. Yes, lithography is a vital part of chip fabrication, but with modern processes (45nm, 32nm), and especially with new “3D” FinFET (22nm) designs, it is really just one step out of hundreds. Lithography is like laying down the concrete foundations of a skyscraper.

Geek.com has a fairly comprehensive guide on how a chip is made — from melting down sand, to etching, to testing, to binning — but basically, this is what you need to know: Once the chip’s pathways have been lithographically etched, the transistors and copper wire interconnects are grown using a combination of electroplating, ion implantation (doping), chemical vapor deposition, atomic layer deposition, and more. Furthermore, most of these processes can be broken down into tens of steps: ALD, for example, builds up the layers of a FinFET transistor atom-by-atom.

It’s not like all of these processes happen inside a magical, all-in-one, Willy Wonkaesque machine, either: To create a single FinFET transistor, for example, Applied Materials provides no less than seven different machines. The silicon wafers must be moved between each of these machines, usually inside an extremely tight vacuum. When you’re dealing with high-k dielectric layers that are just 10 atoms thick, a single atom of a contaminant can ruin the chip.

To top it all off, in a major foundry, this entire process will be almost completely automated — using software provided by Applied Materials, of course. Just so you get some idea of the scale of the process, too, bear in mind that a 300mm fab, as operated by the likes of Intel or TSMC, costs in the region of $4 billion to build. Each Applied Materials machine is around the size of an office desk or large chest freezer, and costs between $2 and $6 million each. Taking a median price of $4 million, that means there could be 1,000 separate machines in a large silicon foundry — all located within a cleanroom that is probably acres in size.

Next page: How Applied Materials and Intel work together to reach 22nm