What is this shiny disc thing? (pic included)?

Question

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1346/1032710885_7a4969f8f7_m.jpg
I see pics of these things all the time in articles that talk about computer processors. They're shiny, gold, and holographic looking. About 18 inches in diameter. They're always being help by people in a clean room. I guess the rectangles have something to do with chips. I think they have something to do with the development process.

Answer 1

Those are silicon "wafers".

If you look at bit closer, you'll see that they actually contain "chips". A laser cut them into smaller pieces, then a "packager" robot pick up a small piece, and put it on a "chip base" with all the feet under it, then using micro movements it puts in the tiny connections that connects the chip to the individual "pins".

As you can see a wafer is really "fixed size", not going to get much larger than that. They tried larger size but it became too delicate and imperfections started messing it up. They "grow" a silicon crystal and then use a laser to cut a tiny perfect round slice, and etch the chips on.

The entire process is a bit big to go into detail. Read more about it here:

http://www.elume.com/semiconductor_manufacturing.htm

Answer 2

thats one of the early forms of a chip. quite afew chips on that wafer disk.

Answer 3

didn't they have this on that commercial introducing macs to intel?