It takes 450 steps starting from the procurement of a raw wafer, permitting cleaning steps and complex processes for multiple chips on the wafer, till the wafer goes for packaging and assembly. The process involves patterning or lithography on the wafer — it means passing the chip design on the wafer for defining circuits after which they are cleaned and polished.

Next comes etching — it means removing the material and creating layers of chips.

After this, the transistors are interconnected, and joined to the aluminum pad, which are then connected to outer world with thin wires.

Of the total 450 steps, 30 per cent pertain cleaning process. Clean room environment is critical for semi-conductor fabs to reduce contamination during processing.

There are machines like lithography system, plasma etcher, defect inspection stations, photo restoration coater.

Technicians load recipes to process wafers — a recipe refers to a set of instructions or parameters used to perform a particular manufacturing process.

The facility must have ultrapure water and different gases. Over 30 types of gases are used.

There are expenses of repair and maintenance of equipment. There are 70 plus equipment, and if any one of them is down, the whole line will stop working.