In this digital age, whether it is a smartphone or a driverless car, it is inseparable from a vital basic component-the wafer. It is the heart of modern electronic equipment, carrying countless sophisticated integrated circuits. For most people, however, the word "wafer" may still seem alien and distant.

So, what exactly is a wafer? And how does it gradually transform from an ordinary silicon raw material to the soul component that supports the entire high-tech industry? Simply put, a wafer is an ultra-pure, extremely high-precision monocrystalline silicon wafer, whose surface is as smooth as a mirror. Tens of thousands or more of tiny transistors are etched into each wafer, creating the kinds of powerful processors and memories we know.

When it comes to the birth of a wafer, it's an amazing technological miracle. The process begins with one of the most common substances in nature-sand. Through a series of complex and elaborate operation steps, including purification, melting, cutting and polishing, etc., a perfect round sheet is finally obtained. Every link requires a very high level of precision control to ensure quality standards.

Of course, not all wafers can meet the growing demand standards in the current market. In order to achieve excellent performance, special attention must be paid to several core indicators in the selection of raw materials: first, "purity". Only substrates with nearly 100% purity can ensure that no impurity interference will be introduced in the subsequent processing. The second is "flatness". Even errors of only a few nanometers may increase the overall failure risk. Finally, there is "consistency", this requires that the differences between the whole batch of products be minimized as much as possible.

With the rapid development of emerging fields such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, the global competition for high-performance computing power solutions is becoming more and more fierce. Therefore, as one of the representative roles of the upstream supply side of the industrial chain, wafer manufacturers have to accelerate their own transformation and upgrading to adapt to the challenges brought by the new situation and changes. For example, the new generation of production line layout planning with larger diameter specifications can significantly reduce the proportion of unit cost input, and at the same time, with the promotion of advanced process nodes, it can further tap the potential space to release more possibilities for downstream customers to choose and use.

Looking forward to the major breakthroughs that may occur in the next few years, in addition to continuing to follow the path guided by Moore's Law to continuously reduce the characteristic line width, exploring new alternative materials has gradually become a hot topic of research. For example, compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide (SiC) or gallium nitride (GaN) show great advantages in high-frequency and efficient application scenarios due to their unique physical and chemical properties.