Re: Why is a wafer for semiconductor manufacturing round and not square?

The ultra-pure silicon for wafers is grown in huge round rods that
are then sliced into wafers. The round shape comes naturally with
the growth process. Making the slices square-shaped would be more
work and waste material.
The yield is lower near the edge of the wafer, because it is more
difficult to control processes there. A circle has the lowest edge-
to-area-ratio of all shapes and thus offers the highest possible
yield. Some of the processes in a wafer fab, e.g. coating with
photoresist by dripping on a spinning wafer, even make use of the
round shape for process uniformity and would not work well with
square wafers.

Greetings from Singapore,
	Frank Berauer