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Their argument that it will be cheaper because of raw materials costs is pure rubbish. That was supposed to be the point of silicon - it’s just sand! Then peopl
by plaidfuji 8y ago
Their argument that it will be cheaper because of raw materials costs is pure rubbish. That was supposed to be the point of silicon - it’s just sand! Then people realized that the structure (crystalline) and energy intensive processing required to obtain that structure were the real cost drivers, not to mention the housing, transparent electrode arrays, and installation costs. Nanotechnology is difficult to manufacture because of the energetic factors working against the formation of long-range nanostructure.
- whatshisface 8y agoEnergetic? It sounds like it would be entropic. Every crystal or polymer is a long-range nanostructure.
- plaidfuji 8y agoSorry, you’re right- but entropy is a part of the thermodynamic free energy of a structure, I was glibly rolling all that into “energy”.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_free_energy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_free_energy
- tlb 8y agoWe can use simple processes to create crystals and polymers for only slightly more energy than the Gibbs energy of the resulting structure. Currently, fabricating custom nanostructures requires vastly more energy than that. A resist + lithography + etching process has to manipulate hundreds of atoms to get each bit of entropy. Biological systems are efficient at creating nanostructures. That may be the future of fabrication. It'll never be repeatable enough for silicon structures like DRAM, but it might someday work for bulk surfaces like solar cells.