Most of us will probably have seen semiconductor wafers as they trundle their way through a chip factory, and some of us may have wondered about why they are round. This roundness is an obvious problem when one considers that the chip dies themselves are rectangular, meaning that a significant amount of the dies etched into the wafers end up being incomplete and thus as waste, especially with (expensive) large dies. This is not a notion which has escaped the attention of chip manufacturers like TSMC, with this particular manufacturer apparently currently studying a way to make square substrates a reality.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://hackaday.com/2024/06/23/tsmcs-long-path-from-round-to-square-silicon-wafers/