Growing enormous, near-perfect silicon crystals is one of the primary skills in modern computer chip manufacturing. These crystals are then sliced into thin wafers, then engraved, processed, and treated in sometimes hundreds of different ways before being diced into the individual die and packaged into commercial processors.

All chips start out with a very simple raw material: sand. Complex chemical and physical processes are required to create out of the sand an pure monocrystalline silicon ingot, called a boule, with only one impurity atom for every ten million silicon atoms. Extremely thin wafers are then cut from the silicon boules using a special sawing technique.