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IBM Recycles Waste CPU Wafers Into Solar Panels
Luyseyal writes "IBM has developed a process for scrubbing waste silicon wafers clean, allowing the otherwise highly secret waste to be sold. The silicon quality usually necessary for solar production is very high and the cost of solar panels reflects it. Recycling this waste should help bring down the cost in the long run and add a new profit vector for chip manufacturers. The article notes that IBM has such a high profile in the chip business that this recycling tech should spread rapidly."
Solar has long fed off the scraps of the IC industry. Indeed, until a few years ago, this was solar's primary source of silicon, which they have now outgrown. IBM has merely decided that a few more scraps worth saving (probably due to silicon's new high prices).
in the Universe. Do we really need to worry about recycling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon
Their scrap wafers turned into solar power should generate more power at a fraction of the cost.
While most PV is currently constructed from wafer silicon, this is not a viable long-term strategy because it takes so much energy to make a wafer. To make real progress, PV needs to move to alternative technologies.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How much energy does it take to make a PV wafer, per usable area? Not including what it takes to deliver and install (and later recycle) it?
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make install -not war
As long as none of those other technologies continue to be competitive with silicon-based solar cells, people will continue to care about silicon-based solar cells.
If you just give me a few hundred thousand dollars, I'll buy a little boat and just dump all your trash in the ocean.
signed,
Nigeria
This is my sig.
... Because now you can have a Beowulf cluster of solar panels?
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
scrubbing waste silicon wafers clean
Looks like Intel and AMD just found themselves a new dry cleaner
"the cost of solar panels reflects it" Slow day at the news desk.
However, it would more impressive if someone can recycle the waste of LCD substrate. The LCD generates huge amount of waste as well.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
So what do they do with SOI wafers? Remove the whole buried oxide layer by CMP?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
too bad it won't run linux... shoulda stuck with the 386s somebody else threw out...
"Are those solar panels real??!! They're huge!"
"No way man, that's got to be silicon. There's no way it's natural."
But you have to remember that in society today, all you have to say is "we want to fight" and then "terrorists," "global warming" or "Tom Cruise" and you're automatically doing the noble thing.
They just decided to choose the 2nd option.
The original generic sig.
LOL! I'd mod you up but I just ran out of points before I saw this one.
The AC said "As the 8th most common element (by mass) in the Universe. Do we really need to worry about recycling?"
And for this he/she was modded Troll. That the AC missed the point that recycling the CPU wafers is about not wasting the effort and energy that went into creating them and is not about the abundance of unrefined silicon is most likely a simple careless mistake and there is no evidence to the contrary. Assuming that it's a deliberate troll attempt and wasting mod points that could have been used to promote the responses that corrected it, in my mind, says more about the moderator who did this than about the AC who was factually wrong (for whatever reason).
Why am I bothering to write this, knowing I will probably be modded down? Because I have noticed a decline in the quality of judgment calls made by some moderators (certainly not all and not most of them) and it tends to express itself in this way. Meta-moderating is great and I gladly do it every time it comes up, but if I meta-mod something as "Unfair" it does nothing to explain why I thought so. Moderating isn't supposed to be about kicking ass, it's more of a small way that we can contribute to a site that we enjoy reading, posting, and yes even trolling in order to make it a better place, but that's true only so long as we have that intention behind it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The article makes you think that if it weren't for this process, their IC design couldn't be figured out. Wrong. As soon as an IC ships, anybody can melt the plastic case (carrier) with nitric acid and do a deep dive on the chip architecture from there. There are entire companies this is all they do.
So I don't get why IBM thinks they need to go through this step. It won't prevent what is already happening.
Big Blue is going to change their name to Big Green.
Homo homini lupus
I watched a video once showing how processors are made. Hard to believe the highly polished and uniform wafers start out as a giant glass turd. All kidding aside, the video also showed all the waste produced. And with silicon being worth a billion dollars an acre, a little bit of payback would be appreciated by chip manufacturers. I'm sure.
The game.
If they even do that, couldn't IBM just stagger the release into recycling as to make it less useful to figure out the architecture for obsolete chips?
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
IBM manufactures chips for many companies other than IBM (including the one where I used to work).
Aren't there ways to get solar power without futzing with photovoltaics?
What sort of efficiency can we get out of focusing sunlight on water (using cheap Fresnel lenses), making steam, and using it to turn a turbine? Is this cheaper per watt of generating capacity to build?
Seems like if you did this on seawater (on a big barge or similar), you could extract the water once the steam recondensed and getting desalination for free. If desalination becomes necessary to supply freshwater this might be worth it.
You presume to much. The transportation cost for moving coal to a power plant is 200 times higher for the amount of energy produced than the transportation cost of taking a solar panel from a factory to your roof. Solar beat nuclear in this measure as well if you consider that uranium is mined in Austraia and enriched in France. Of course it makes sense to make panels where there is hydro power. But, there is hydro power in a lot of places so why the globalization jab? Shipping solar panels a long way is less stupid that shipping coal a long way or uranium a long way, but with the latter two, you don't have much choice, with solar panels you can set up factories in a distributed manner, so you save even more.
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Save with solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html
Hope IBM is not planning on patenting their method. This kind of thing has been studied already to understand the energy savings from recycling solar cells. Recycling solar cells requires about one third the energy of making new cells: http://www.solarworld.de/solarmaterial/english/press/8AV.3.14.pdf. And, basically, you scrape off what was on the waffer before and then start again. Note that in the link, they assume about 2.7 peak equivilent sun hours per day. A typical value for the US is 5 so that the energy payback time would be about 2 years for a new panel and 8 months for a recycled panel. For 40 years of use you get EROEIs of 20 and 60 for new and recycled respectively. But, you have to wait 40 years to start getting the cheaper deal ;-)
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Rent solar and save: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html
print solar panels on any kind of thin film. http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/view/399
I read on a book about a Germany based solar plate vendor produces their solar plates using the power generated from the solar plates they produced and installed outside their building. This is not a perfect solution. But better then totally rely on power generated from other not-green sources.
http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/
(it NEVER hurts)
(now, people complaining about storing energy for night-time, can start ranting NOW!)
Anyone care to clue me in on why the parent was modded "troll"?
IBM is bragging about having developed a cleaner way to do a wholely unneccessary process. Is that not fact?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yes, you're right- on a comparable scale of cost per megawatt produced our current PV technology costs more than 10x that of all other common energy sources. And although PV panels don't have any emmissions, the manufacturing process isn't exactly environmentally friendly either. However it is great for specific circumstances, mostly isolated (off-grid) applications, or for peak-demand in sunny areas (solar-powered air conditioners!). So developments like this one are welcome but it would be wrong to think that the world's energy problems will be solved soon. The only way in which solar power will make even a small difference to the world's energy production is if a new material is developed, or a fundamentally different solar technology, that lowers the overal cost to less than 1/10 of which is currently is. But it's certainly possible.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
You do realize that the point here is in taking SCRAP silicon wafers and putting them to productive use? They're not claiming that semiconductor quality silicon is "THE ANSWER" for low cost/low energy manufacture of photovoltaic cells. They've just developed a process that allows them to use material that would otherwise go to a landfill for production of solar energy.
See http://www.konarka.com/ to learn more about their Power Plastic. Kicks traditional photovoltaic systems in the nuts.
Great point...except this article is talking about using wafers that were already made for CPUs. So all this energy it takes to make the wafer has already been expended, it is done, over with, can't be returned, end of story...except now they can get some of it back if they use the wafer for solar cells!
Where I used to work already did this (sold scrap wafers to a solar cell company)...I haven't RTFA, but I assume IBM has found a much better/cheaper/more efficient way to do this.
I was at the gym, and while I was running on the treadmill the Discovery Channel's "How it's made" program was on. The first segment was on the manufacture of disposable plastic shopping bags. It was of those production processes that has literally dozens of amazingly clever little machines so that people have little to do but move bulk materials like plastic pellets or sheeting from one production line to another, eventually taking boxes of finished product off the last machine.
The next segment was on the production of solar panels, and the contrast was not only striking, it was shocking. The entire process is done by hand. The elements on a wafer are joined up by a technician applying flux to the wafer and soldering metal strips across them. The wafers are transferred by hand to a small ultrasound cleaner that washed about a half dozen of them at a time, and then they are again hand soldered together and tested. The technician then places strips of wafer on a glass plate, applies an adhesive backing to them by hand, then carries the partially completed panel to a vacuum oven. It's not clear whether they bake more than one panel at a time, but the oven is probably not big enough to hold more than a few.
Given that it takes six hours for a single technician to make a panel, he can produce not quite six of them in a work week. I'm guessing each panel produces 150 - 200 watts, which would cost around $700 to $1000 for you to buy. A few quick calculations indicate that with a moderately skilled technician, factoring in overhead, vacation, holidays etc., producing a solar panel using the method shown had to involve on the order of $300 to $500 of labor, let's say conservatively labor is roughly half the retail cost.
This means that even laying aside economies of scale in manufacturing the wafers, there is considerable room for price improvements even using current technologies, provided sales volumes are enough to attract investment in the production technology. The reason that shopping bags have automation technology lavished upon them is that they are produced in countless numbers. Perhaps mass production friendly solar technologies might make photovoltaics more cost effective, even if the efficiency of the panels was somewhat less.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why not use the heat of the sun concentrated by mirrors to heat the sand and produce the silicon wafers? Wouldn't it be 100% renewable then?
Yes, the news is not "IBM Invents Solar Recycling", but that they found a better way of erasing their Intellectual Property from the wafers so they can be recycled more readily.
-l
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IBM probably processes less than 100,000 wafers, mixed 200mm and 300mm, a month. If they are yielding 80% to devices that is 20,000 wafers a month available for solar applications. And this is a very aggressive estimate. It isn't a lot compared to the needs of the photovoltaic people, who now by more silicon that the semiconductor companies.
But recycling is good, I guess, given the cost of making silicon in the first place.
There are enough existing solar panels to produce more solar panels with existing technologies forever, or at least until the sun burns out. There is no need to use any energy input other than the sun, and if there were, manufacturers could just use their first production runs to power subsequent runs. It's called up-front investment and it's not a new or untried business method.
I'll grant you that magically eliminating the investment required to build things would make those things cheaper in the mythical perfectly capitalist environment, but "real progress" (to use your term) is already being made.
the temperature of the water is based on the square of the area you're using to gather sunlight
No it's not.
The collector temperature is related to the sterradial average of the temperatures it "sees" in all directions around it.
If it's in space and "sees" sunlight for the sun's normal subtended angle and 4-degrees absolute empty space around it (mod a sprinkling of distant stars) its equilibrium temperature is about that of a high-orbit satellite at the earth's orbital distance from the sun - i.e. a bit below freezing (since it doesn't hage a greenhouse atmosphere around it to raise the apparent temperature of the black sky by returning some of its own re-radiated heat).
If it's surrounded by optics so that it "sees" the sun in all directions, its equilibrium temperature is that of the solar photosphere.
Same is true here on earth - except that you'd have to put it in a really good vacuum bottle on really good insulating supports to approach solar temperatures. But you can do molten metal temperatures just fine with mirrors of ANY size. (It's just that with smaller mirrors you need a smaller target.)
Yes, efficiency is related to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends, how fast you can pull heat is proportional to the area of the collector, and pulling heat also drops the temperature of the collector. But you can go for very high efficiency if you're willing to pay to do things right.
And that's exactly what photovoltaics do, on an atomic level, photon-by-photon. (Their current merely moderate efficiency is mainly due to their being tuned to particular photon energies, causing them to miss any photons below that energy level and discard any extra energy from photons above it. Fixes for that are being worked on and so far the best one is quantum-dot coatings, to slice and stack photon energies into "sandwitch fillings" of exactly the desired height.)
Of course efficiency isn't what you're really after. What you're really after is power-per-dollar.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why not store the wafers for a few years before selling them as scrap? Does anyone really care about yesterday's outdated chip designs?
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
What do you mean by "unnecessary"? Is any kind of recycling or conservation necessary?
They want to recycle the wafers which are imprinted with their designs that they want to keep secret. We can argue about whether or not keeping these secrets is "necessary", but that's irrelevant, because obviously IBM (and presumably other chip makers) thinks it is.
In addition, the article mentions that the "cleaned" wafers can be reused internally a number of times before being shipped out to the solar cell makers. That represents an energy savings.
Saving energy is clearly not "necessary" in the sense that they've been surviving without doing this before. But it may be "necessary" in the sense that too much combined energy waste will kill us all.