The wafers are also subjected to treatments such as chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) to achieve extremely high flatness and surface quality. On the wafer, the circuit design is scaled down and replicated through complex microelectronic processes such as photolithography, etching, ion implantation, and thin film deposition to form tiny circuit elements such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These steps are repeated many times to form a multilayer structure, ultimately creating thousands of integrated circuit chips on a wafer. Once fabrication is complete, the wafers are cut into individual chips, each containing one or more complete integrated circuits. These chips then go through a packaging process to become our common electronic components that can be mounted on circuit boards.