How to Start Learning Semiconductors: Beginner Reading Order
If you are learning semiconductors from scratch, this order works well: ① semiconductors and transistors (the foundation) → ② how chips are made → ③ what chips do inside products → ④ the industry and the news. Each stage uses words you learned in the stage before. This page puts the site's Explainers in reading order. For each stage, it also says what you will be able to explain.
What you'll learn
- A map of how to learn semiconductors (four stages)
- Which articles to read at each stage, and why in that order
- Shortcuts for different goals (the news, a new job, an exam)
- Common beliefs that trip up beginners
Prerequisites: none. A rough memory of current and voltage from school science is enough.
In everyday life
News stories use words like "2 nm," "foundry" and "HBM" one after another, with no explanation. If you join a chip company, people say "front end" and "yield" in meetings as if everyone knows them. You look one word up, and its explanation uses another word you don't know. It is hard to make progress.
This happens because chip words come in an order: some must be learned before others. For example, to understand "2 nm," you first need to know two things. One is the tiny switch called a transistor. The other is the step that copies circuits onto the chip with light. If you read in the right order, each explanation sits neatly on what you already know. This page is a guide to that order.
The big picture: four stages
This page splits learning semiconductors into the four stages below. They are arranged so that, read in number order, the words from one stage become the base for the next. Within each stage, too, it is best to read from the top down.
To keep things simple, the stages are shown here as one road. In practice, you can start with whatever you want to know. Each article opens with a one-line note on what you need to know first ("Prerequisites"). If you feel something is missing, go back to the articles named there.
Each stage's articles are split into "Read first" and "Read next." The "Read first" articles alone give you the key points of the stage. The "Read next" articles are for picking by interest.
Step 1: Semiconductors and tiny switches (the foundation)
The first stage follows one path, from the material called a semiconductor to a chip that computes. This is the foundation for every other stage. When you finish, you can explain in your own words how a small piece of silicon can do calculations.
Read first
- What Is a Semiconductor? A material whose ability to conduct electricity can be changed a lot by adding impurities or applying a voltage. You also learn why silicon is used.
- What Is a Transistor? A tiny switch that turns a current on and off with an electrical signal. You see how the properties of a semiconductor become a switch.
- How Do Computers Use Binary? How high and low voltages stand for 1 and 0, and how they represent numbers. You see why combining switches lets a computer add.
- What Is a Logic Gate? A small circuit that takes in 0s and 1s and gives back a 0 or 1 by a fixed rule. You see how the parts of a computing circuit are built from transistors.
- What Is an Integrated Circuit? Many parts and wires put together on one piece of silicon. This is where you pin down what a "chip" in the news really means.
Read next
- What Is a Diode? A part that lets current flow in only one direction. It also leads to how LEDs and solar cells work.
- What Is CMOS? A design that pairs two kinds of transistors that act in opposite ways. You see how chips save power.
Step 2: How chips are made
Next is how those chips are made in a factory. Once you know this, you can follow news about chip factories and chipmaking equipment. When you finish, you can explain the basic cycle. On a round disk, you add a film, copy a pattern onto it and remove what is not needed, over and over.
Read first
- How Are Chips Made? Start with the whole flow. It is a map from making hundreds of chips at once on a round disk (a wafer) to cutting them apart and packaging them.
- What Is Thin-Film Deposition? The step that puts a very thin film on the surface of the wafer.
- What Is Photolithography? The step that uses light to copy the circuit pattern onto the film.
- What Is Etching in Semiconductors? The step that removes the unwanted parts of the film, following the copied pattern. Repeating these three steps builds up the circuit in many layers.
Read next
- What Is a Silicon Wafer? How the round disk that everything is built on is made from rock.
- What Is a Cleanroom? Why chip factories fight dust so hard.
- Ion Implantation Explained The step that shoots impurities into the wafer. It creates the n-type and p-type regions explained in "What Is a Semiconductor?" in exactly the right places.
- What Is CMP in Semiconductors? The step that polishes the surface flat before the next layer goes on.
- How Are Chips Tested? The steps that find faulty chips and remove them before shipping.
- What Is Semiconductor Packaging? The case that protects a chip and connects it to the device's circuit board, and how it is made.
- Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment The kinds of machines used at each step, and the companies that make them.
Step 3: What chips do inside products
The third stage is what the finished chips do inside products. There are different kinds of chips, and they share the work: computing, storing data, changing the form of electric power and more. When you finish, you can explain the role of the chips named in a phone's spec sheet or in articles about electric cars.
Read first
- What Is a CPU? The part that fetches a program's instructions one at a time and keeps calculating and comparing. You also learn what "number of cores" on a spec sheet means.
- Memory vs Storage: What's the Difference? The difference between where data sits while you work and where photos and apps are kept. You learn what "8 GB" and "256 GB" are counting.
- Why Are GPUs Used for AI? Why chips that run huge numbers of simple calculations at the same time suit AI. After this, news about "AI chips" makes sense.
- What Is a Power Semiconductor? Parts that change the form of electricity or adjust the speed of a motor. This is a second big field, separate from chips that compute.
- What Chips Are Inside a Smartphone? A look at how all the chips so far share the work inside one phone.
Read next
- How DRAM Works and How Do SSDs Work? A closer look inside memory and storage.
- How Do Image Sensors Work? How a phone camera turns light into electricity.
- What Chips Are Inside an Electric Car? An example of a product where power semiconductors play the lead role.
- What Is a Microcontroller? A tiny computer that runs things like rice cookers and cars.
- What Is an Analog Chip? Chips that handle signals that change smoothly, like sound or temperature.
Step 4: The industry and the news
The last stage is for reading chip news. If you know the first three stages, you can make sense of company names and numbers. When you finish, you can explain why chip factories become a topic of national policy. You can explain it from the steps of making chips and from how the work is divided among companies.
Read first
- What Is a Semiconductor Foundry? Why the industry split into companies that design chips and companies that make chips to order. You see why companies like Taiwan's TSMC are in the news.
- What Caused the Global Chip Shortage? Why chips ran short from 2020 to 2022. The fact that factories cannot be added quickly links back to Step 2.
- What Is Moore's Law? The observation that the number of transistors on a chip has doubled about every two years. You learn the background of "scaling," which means making parts smaller to pack more in.
- What Does 2nm or 3nm Mean? These numbers are names of technology generations. They are not the length of any part of the chip. The article is easier if you know the transistor from Step 1 and the light-copying step from Step 2.
Read next
- What Is EUV Lithography? The special light used to copy circuit patterns for the most advanced chips.
- What Is HBM? Stacked memory placed right next to an AI chip.
- What Is a Chiplet? A way to build a big chip as smaller pieces and then combine them.
Shortcuts for different goals
If your time is limited, you can also read in one of the orders below, depending on your goal. Every shortcut starts with "What Is a Semiconductor?" and "What Is a Transistor?" These two articles are the base that the other explanations build on.
- To understand the news: semiconductors → transistors → integrated circuits → foundries → what "2 nm" means.
- If you just joined a chip company: semiconductors → transistors → how chips are made. For the kinds of jobs in the industry, the Careers guide describes each role in detail.
- If you are taking a Japanese IT exam: semiconductors → transistors → computing with 0 and 1 → logic gates → CPU → memory and storage → How Does CPU Cache Work? This is for IT Passport and the Fundamental Information Technology Engineer Examination, two national IT exams in Japan. Check what each exam covers in the latest documents from IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan), which runs the exams.
Common myths
Myth: You can't understand semiconductors until you have studied physics and math properly.
In fact, you can get a picture of how things work with about middle-school science. The articles in the four stages on this page also explain with words and figures and use almost no equations. Equations and theory help after you have the picture, when you want to check why things work that way. At that point, move on to the series that explains the basics of physics, chemistry and math from the technology side.
Myth: The quickest way is to start with the newest words you see in the news.
In fact, the newer a word is, the more basic words it stands on. For example, "2 nm" does not mean that some part of the chip is 2 nm long. If you memorize the numbers without the basics, it is easy to make mistakes like this. Even if the news is your goal, read the five articles of Step 1 first. They help you avoid misreading the numbers in the news.
Myth: If you work in sales or administration, you don't need to know how chips are made.
In fact, you don't need to learn every detail of the process. But the reasons for long delivery times and changing prices are tied to how factories work. For example, the steps that build circuits on the wafer (the front end) take about 12 weeks on average. That figure is from a 2021 explainer by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), a US industry group. Knowing numbers like this makes it easier to explain things to customers and colleagues.
By the numbers: how long does it take?
Every article on this page takes about 10 to 15 minutes to read. Each article shows an estimated reading time under its title. Each stage has 4 or 5 "Read first" articles. At one a day, you can finish a stage within a week.
Reading all the "Read first" articles in the four stages takes about three weeks at one a day. This is not based on average reading speeds; it is only a rough guide. It does not include time spent stopping at hard parts or reading something twice.
Learn more
- See the differences in a table: Conductor vs Semiconductor vs Insulator / Front-End vs Back-End Semiconductor Process / IDM vs Fabless vs Foundry / CPU vs GPU
- Try it yourself: with the Logic circuit simulator, you can connect gates and watch how the 0s and 1s change.
- Technology ahead: "Beyond scaling" sorts out the directions new technology is taking beyond Step 4.
- If you want to become an engineer: to move on to explanations with equations, one path is to start with "What Is a Resistor?" and "What Is a Capacitor?" Then go on to "Fermi-Dirac vs Boltzmann Distribution in Semiconductors."
- Look up words: you can check the exact meaning of words you meet in the articles in the Glossary.