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The other one big obstacle is chips are square while wafers are round.


it depends on the exact shape of your mask of course, but typically losses around the edges are in the 2-3% range.

It's not really possible to fix this either since wafers need to be round for various manufacturing processes (spinning the wafer for coating or washing stages) and round obviously isn't a dense packing of the mask itself. It just kinda is how it is, square mask and round wafer means you lose a bit off the edges, fact of life.


The interesting part is loss scales with the die size.




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