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Silicon Seduced From Silica
Roland Piquepaille writes "Making silicon is an expensive process, which conventionally involves carbothermal reduction, in which the oxygen is removed from silica by a heterogeneous-homogeneous reaction sequence at approximately 1,700 C. Now, Japanese researchers have developed a new technique which uses electricity to remove the oxygen from silica. Their technique is based on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride salt at 850 C, which should reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium. Check this column for a summary or read this article from Nature for additional details."
So, like, when do the divorce proceedings begin? How could he DO that to poor Silica?
My journal has hot
I was going to ask if this was going to make the price of breast implants drop low enough so that the procedure would be available to all the women that would want it; for example, to the point where one could simply hand out gift certificates. Then I realized that modern boobs are now just saline solution, and the high price must come from the "doctors" performing the procedure itself.
Mmmmm... Brine. Delicious brine.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
interesting stuff, there's enough sand around here (SE FLA), they could start mining the stuff here, make chips literally dirt cheap (or would it be sand cheap ?:( ...
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
... at least mentioned why this is a good thing.
My early estimates indicate that this new process (developed by Japanese researchers) will allow synthetic silicon to be cheaper and much more delicate.
I am seduced by silicon babes too!
If it's not obvious from the definition, silica is silicon dioxide, SiO2. It is the primary ingredient for making glass. IConsider it as purified sand - all the impurities that color the SiO2 have been removed.
Silly Slashdot, silicon seldom slides off silica in a salt steam salon!
I wonder if this idea is good for Diamonds as well.
Imagine, turning graphite into Diamonds at 850 Celsius at 1 Atmospere instead of: 640,000 psi and 1450 C
and misread it to say something about silicone and seduction? :)
reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium
Fake diamonds and fake racks drop in price, the pr0n wars begin! Scratching and clawing for territory, kicking for market share, it is an all girl-on-girl cage match!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I freqently apply a coating of "thermal grease" to your mom's silicon modules using my special tool.
Good thing they aren't AMD or else I'd be voiding her warranty.
not related to silicon, but i like to point that out. in case people are looking for uses for zirconium =).
for those that thought about it - no spectra is not good enough for space elevator. only 3GPa tensile strength (steel about .25 for cheap ones and 5 for REALLY good ones). space elevator needs ~62GPa. nanotubes ~150GPa theoretical.
okay. end rant.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Now prices can remain the same while profits go up...
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
Obviously it will reduce the cost of silicon chips ... a little. In fact a 3 inch Si wafer costs about 3 USD. So you Intel Hexium Pro 10 GHz chip cost will not be much affected by this. However the solar power industry has often used Si cutoffs from teh chips industry, a kind of recycling and there the cost scale is very different.
As wafers have grown in size (and changed from inches to metrics), up to 300 mm production size today, it means there is effectively less cutoffs available to make cheap polycrystalline solar cells. Sure, mono crystalline solar cells are more efficient but also far more costly.
This new process then can mean a lot more cheap solar cells. Imagine like all available roof areas being covered, down to the top of all cars.
When will I profit from this?
Or is this more a thing for my grand children?
A cost reduction of computer equipment in the not-too-distant future?
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Free your mind.
The cost of the silicon wafers has an enormous impact on the cost of silicon solar cells. If this cost can be brought down with this new technology suddenly solar energy becomes competitive !
Markus
"which should reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium"
Isn't making elements alchemy? When I went to school, you couldn't 'make' elements....
This process involves turning one chemical compound (SiO2) into a pure element (Si)
Graphite and diamond are both pure carbon. You need those high temperatures and pressures to cause the atoms to rearrange into the crystal lattice of diamond.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Actually, the Japanese had similar oxygen destroying technology since 1954, unfortunately, the discoverer Dr. Serizawa chose to commit suicide rather than risk having the technology made into a weapon. The technology was rediscovered in the 1990s, unfortunately, the manner in which it was re-revealed to the world led to unfavorable publicity. Only now has the furor died down enough for oxygen destroying technology to finally realize its potential.
Remember your chemistry? REG and LEO? Reduction is Electron Gain, Loss of Electrons is Oxidation
The fact that oxygen is being removed from the compound should have given you a clue.
Stick Men
btw - this kinda shows how bs was bush's little thing about saddam using ALUMINUM tubes for reactors.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
At last a solution to all the trolling problems on slashdot.
t ml.
;-)
you see trolls are made of silica and other elements found in igneous rocks(the stuff mountains are made of).
75% to 45% of the average igneous rock is silica http://www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/physgeog/contents/10e.h
therefore trolls are more than 45% (and maybe as much as 75%) silica.
turn the heat up on trolls, and create the raw materials for more computers.
sparkes
PS. or alternativly lets just contine to ignore them
blog and junk
Therefore the collected silicon mus be remelted, drawn, cleaned, sliced into tiny placks, etched, washed and polished. However this is also has to be done with silicon obtained in other ways. Nowadays there are machines who can perform most of these procedures in one run.
A short explanation of this can be found here
I don't know how much the raw silicon costs, but I suspect that most of the cost of the wafers comes from this month-long crystal growth and planarization. Good (ie, very flat) 200mm silicon wafers for semiconductor production can cost up to $1000 each, although they are probably much cheaper now due to lack of demand. Many processes also don't require the flattest wafers and so one can get by with wafers that cost a small fraction of that.
Having worked in a lab using Si wafers I can reliably tell you that you could get 2" and 3" Si wafers for 2-3 USD, 10 years ago.
If you scale area up by a factor of 10 but pay a factor 100+ more then you are getting a raw deal. I have to presume that the cost you mentioned is for very, very special purpose production.
Only a small fraction is actually turned into wafers, and the expense in that process has less to do with turning silica into silicon, but turning impure silicon into really, really pure, single crystal silicon. [It's actually a really cool process, I wish I could remember the details. It involves bonding the silicon to something, and distilling it.] And this cost is very small compared to the cost of turning a wafer into chips.
This discovery, if it actually saves money, will have some impact on the steel industry, but practically none on the semiconductor industry.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Zirconium is in the same column in the periodic table so I think it is possible that the researchers are thinking about Titanium too, because it is expensive to produce with the process available and with high potential of money return.
Hmm, last I checked Spectra 1000 has tensile modulus of 172GPa (older version, Spectra 900 is at 117GPa or so) and steel averages around 210GPa... I wouldn't call that a huge difference. certainly more than half as you claimed.
.97 (water at 1) and steel 7.8 or so...
impressive especially considering spectra has specific weight of
I mean, I can't imagine that if cost wasn't a consideration, any places where you wouldn't want a lighter material vs. the heavier one (except that polyethylene is not good with fire, so car engines are out).
but i digress. steel is cheap. but damn, as far as materials go, spectra is about the sexiest we got right now (that's mass-producable, anyway).
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Yes, and get nagged even more after being married that it's not a real diamond.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Cheap zirconium.
Now, I can buy my wife even more "diamonds".
Oh, boy! I'm gonna get lucky!
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I'd figure that weight (specific. grav) would tell a great deal... Steel is at 7.8, Zirconium at 6.5, Aluminum at 3.2 or something. Besides that Aluminum has a tendency to oxidize in normal environments, giving it a hazy looking coat. Okay 7.8 and 6.5 is kinda hard, but I bet with enough practice it's doable. I mean, 20% difference.
All bets are off if they are alloyed, though...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Thimply Faaabulouth
Eat at Joe's.
There's something ironic about that... ;)
on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride
I usually bath my silicon babes in water and soap. Does this change the quality of the silicon at all?
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Support Indy Music. Buy
Silica is the primary component of the Moon's surface (and Earth's too) - this technique could greatly reduce the cost to produce useful things (like oxygen as a fuel component and for life in space, and silicon for solar cells) out of bulk lunar material.
Large-scale space construction is coming, and will provide one of the major markets for lunar materials. Martin Rees has a new book out that is pretty clear on why we need to develop space resources. Here's another enabling technology - now let's go do it!
By the way, anybody in the SF bay area this coming weekend should check out the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where we'll be discussing a lot of these ideas, and more!
Energy: time to change the picture.
They have been doing this with aluminum for decades. They put aluminum oxide in molten sodium aluminum floride and use electricity to seperate the oxygen from aluminum. I'm suprised that a similar technique for silicon was just recently invented.
WOW, a subject where I seem to be the first "expert" to post.
I work in the semiconductor industry. (actually, for one of he largest producers of semiconductor-grade silicon in the world,) and I'm intimately familiar with the process to turn silicon from sand into wafers for chip manufacture. At my work, we are the middle step. I'll explain:
Semiconductor-grade silicon is ultra-pure silicon metal (I mean parts-per-billion atomic purity.) All the semi-grade Si in the world is produced in approximately the same way.
Silica (sand) is reduced to "metallurgical grade" silicon (~99.5% pure) in an arc furnace process, the sand is melted with a reducing agent (often carbon), and the molten metal is poured off. (this is a very cool process. The smelter has a hole in the bottom that is allowed to freeze shut with Si, and when they're ready to pour, someone shoots out the Si plug with a shotgun. Cool job)
This metallurgical grade Si is sold to intermediate producers who grind it to a fine powder, and react it with gaseous HCl in fluid bed reactors to generate chlorosilanes (H3SiCl, H2SiCl2, HSiCl3, SiCl4.) These chlorosilanes are then distilled to very high purity ~99.999% or more.
The chlorosilanes (different ones for different manufacturers) are then used in the Siemens process to produce semiconductor-grade POLYCRYSTALLINE silicon. The process works by Chemical Vapor Deposition. Ultra-pure silicon rods are placed in a reactor in an inverted U shape, and each end of the U is connected to an electrical circuit. The atmosphere inside the reactor is purged of all gasses and then chlorosilane vapors are introduced. Huge amounts of electricity are used to heat the U circuits to incandescence (imagen a 600 megawatt lightbulb) and the ultra-pure chlorosilanes decompose into Si and HCl at the surface of the rods.
The problem with the silicon, at this point, is that it's polycrystalline, not single crystal. In order to produce proper IC's, the crystal structure of the silicon must be perfect 1,1,1 crystal. Polycrystalline silicon (a.k.a. poly) is a random oriented growth where the crystal structures of many crstals have grown together. The poly is reduced in size and sent to a crystal pulling facility (wafer fab) where it is used in the Czoralski process for making wafers.
The CZ process consists of melting a large amount of poly, then dipping in a "seed" crystal. This perfect single-crystal specimen is "dipped" into the molten silicon while being rotated. The seed is then carefully "pulled" upwards while rotating, and the resulting ingot grows in diameter based on the pull speed, and several other factors (300mm is current state of the art.)
Once the pull is completed, a ~1000+ kg log of single crystal silicon is made, and is ready for final processing to wafers. The tapered ends are removed (top and tail) and the "log" is shaved down perfectly round and to the proper diameter. Diamond impregnated wire saws are used to slice the log into wafers, the wafers are lapped and polished, and they are ready to have IC's printed on them. (some are further processed, but you get the gist.
HTH
GM
I suppose this would have an impact on all electronic devices based on silicon, including transistors and diodes.
I'm a mechanical engineer with extensive experience with composite and exotic materials (IAAE). The parent poster makes an very important point, which I couln't agree more with.
I am thinking that perhaps the cost of raw silicon is not the rate limiting factor in the manufactre of chips.
A new processor goes for several hundred dollars...the silicon in it can't be more than a few dollars, with the rest going to pay for the cost of R&D.
I could be wrong on this, though. Does anyone know for sure?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Not.
So it takes half the power to extract silicon from silica.
Big whoop.
It's one step in the thousand-step process from deciding to scoop sand to powering up an integrated circuit.
Stuff that matters. Says so right up there on the banner. Try to keep it that way.
"which should reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium." Hey you freaking morons...Zirconium is NOT AN ELEMENT! Pull yout Slashdotted brains out of your asses and go BACK TO SCHOOL! You fucking putz's. Mod me you brainless COWARDS!
"Their technique is based on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride salt at 850 C ..."
The secret step in this process involves gently applying a loofa to the silica while it is bathing. Molten calcium chloride salt sounds irritating, but throw in a naturally occuring sponge and you've got yourself a fiesta!
Maybe one day we'll have solar panels that don't require more energy to make than we ultimately get out of them.
reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium
So you mean that crappy costume jewelry on the home shopping channel is getting even cheaper? Let the floodgates to the trailer park open.
Anybody want a peanut?
Does this mean breast implants will be more affordable now (not to mention implants of various other parts...) ? :-|
-l
Sorry, I couldn't resist. It's one of those SA things.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Maybe I'll finally be able to afford those zircon-encrusted tweezers that are so useful for picking dental floss.