why are chips often so expensive? how do chip companies determine the prices of their chips? a thread... 🧵

first thing chip companies do is to figure out the COGS - cost of goods sold. this is how much it costs them to produce a chip--not counting profit or anything else.

but before we can calculate that, we need to know The Life of a Chip, start to finish!

it starts as a raw slice of silicon, something like this. (0th step is a raw boule or silicon ingot, grown as a single crystal, that is sawn up like this)

then it gets run through a variety of processing steps. etching, diffusion, implantation, deposition, and others.