4 ms·
Probably a few factors: - Difficulty growing high quality crystals - All the process chemistry for building devices would be different - Toxicity/radioactivi
by philipkglass 6y ago
Probably a few factors:
- Difficulty growing high quality crystals
- All the process chemistry for building devices would be different
- Toxicity/radioactivity
The third one is IMO the least important. There are a lot of semiconductor materials that theoretically have properties comparable to or better than silicon for solar cells (as this paper suggests). But having a theoretically good band gap doesn't matter if the actual material as grown is full of deleterious defects. We're really good at growing near-perfect silicon crystals. We're not so good at growing perfect crystals of iron (II) sulfide, uranium dioxide, etc.
Even if that could be solved, re-developing all the chemistry and tooling for fabricating dense logic/memory devices based on uranium dioxide instead of silicon would require an extraordinary investment of money and time. It could be comparable to or even more expensive than the transition to extreme ultraviolet lithography.
- omgJustTest 6y agoChemical scarcity should be in your list, and it is the reason silicon will remain for years to come, at least in electric domains.
- retrac 6y agoYep. I tried to ballpark the amount of polysilicon used to actually make ICs. Somewhere between 100,000 and 10 million tonnes a year, I figure. Those little dies are only 100 mg or so but we print them by the billions. Whether the real number is more to the high or low end of that, it's hopeless. As Wikipedia says "About 118 tonnes of germanium was produced in 2011 worldwide."
- fuzzfactor 6y agoIt can require very pure materials to make conductors and semiconductors or they won't act right. And it can take kilos of 99 percent pure raw material to end up with a few grams of 99.999 or better. Silicon was already available in rail cars having 99+ percent purity for steelmaking.