After a chip is manufactured, testing is done to measure its clock speed, power consumption, the number of working cores, and more. After testing, the chips as classified by how they perform. Top-performing components are placed in the top bins and are sold as high-end silicon. Other chips that don’t make the grade are placed in lower bins and command reduced prices. A chip with one defective core could be sold as having seven cores instead of eight, for example.
Test silicon wafer found by a Redditor in a dumpster near TSMC’s Fab 16. | Image credit-Reddit subscriber AVX512-VNNI
Some of the other Reddit subscribers had good ideas about what to do with the wafer with some suggesting that it be placed inside a picture frame and put on a wall where it could be displayed like a work of art. Considering what these wafers are for, what they do, and the amazing devices powered by the chips cut from them, no one can deny how valuable such art would be.
Most of the responses were jokes with one calling for the use of diamond-tipped pizza slicers to dice the wafer. But with the space between chips only .5mm, you would need to be an expert in cutting pizza slices in order to dice a silicon wafer should you find one of your very own.
