Slashdot Mirror
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."
... 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 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
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.
Have we really come to the point where even Slashdotters don't know the difference between silicon and silicone? It is no wonder that the perfectly good word niggardly is lost forever.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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?
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.
Would discovering that the diamond is fake be grounds for having the marriage annulled?
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.