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> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make i
by onetimeuse92304 3y ago
> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product.
I call BS. It is rare, true. But it is found in reasonable concentrations in some minerals (alongside molybdenum) that are already being mined and we just need to learn to extract rhenium out of it. For high perf semiconductors you only need microscopic amounts of it anyway.
As to costs, majority of the costs are not in substrates anyway, however costly they are. The costs are in IP and in processing. I suspect even if silicon was as expensive as gold it would not meaningfully change the cost of current high-end CPUs that go into our phones.
(edited, I mistakenly wrote ruthenium where I meant rhenium)
- foobarian 3y agoRuthenium is a bit different than Rhenium. But either way you can get it online. https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoI meant rhenium. Don't know why I wrote ruthenium, that is obviously a mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.
- foobarian 3y agoI am glad you did because it led me on a Wiki chase and I learned new things :-)
- readthenotes1 3y agoDid you see some dishes no longer moldy?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 3y agoWhy would someone buy this? What can you do with a Rhenium ingot?
- runeks 3y agoYou can build the fastest semiconductor yet
- adrian_b 3y agoYou can be amazed of its density, but that is safer to do with the lighter, but much cheaper, tungsten. Most chemical elements with atomic numbers equal or greater than that of lutetium are very slightly radioactive (with a few exceptions like iridium, gold, mercury and lead). Rhenium is one of the most radioactive of them, but it is several orders of magnitude less radioactive than thorium and uranium. Nevertheless, its radioactivity is so weak that it can be handled safely with bare hands. Even so, making some jewelry kept permanently on the skin is unlikely to be a good idea.
- Gare 3y ago> Rhenium is one of the most radioactive of them, but it is several orders of magnitude less radioactive than thorium and uranium. Rhenium does have one stable isotope, which comprises 37,4% of naturally ocurring Rhenium. 62,6% is radioactive Rh-187 with a half-life of 10^10 years. That's a bit longer than U-235 or U-238. But unlike uranium, Rh-187 decays into stable osmium.
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoYeah, rhenium radioactivity is pretty much irrelevant for health. I would worry more about radioactivity as a failure mode for these transistors. Given how fast these are and how few atoms are supposed to be there, the question is if a single atom in the lattice undergoing fission can a) blow up the lattice enough to disrupt it b) make it no longer perform the function because the atom that is there has different chemical properties
- foobarian 3y ago
- QwertyPi 3y ago[flagged]
- adrian_b 3y agoIts concentration in minerals is not reasonable, but extremely small. The yearly production per human is a barely visible grain with a volume of about a quarter of a cubic millimeter. If each human would want to have a ring of rhenium, that would need all the global production accumulated during one thousand years. All of it is heavily contended for various applications like gas turbine blades, so the price is in the same range as for platinum-group elements, which are in fact much more abundant. If the semiconductor layers would have thicknesses in the tens of nanometer range, i.e. they would be deposited on some crystallographically compatible substrate, then such a semiconductor might be usable for expensive devices. Nevertheless, developing a deposition method that can recycle all the non-deposited rhenium may be not easy. The deposition methods normally used frequently deposit far more substance on the equipment walls than on the semiconductor wafer. When depositing pure inert metals like gold or platinum, there are relatively easy methods to recover them, e.g. by dissolving in acid everything else. Such a complex substance containing rhenium might be obtained from a chemical reaction during the deposition, but it may be difficult to find precursors that are also easy to recycle.
- runeks 3y ago> All of it is heavily contended for various applications like gas turbine blades […] Then why does it only cost $1 per gram? [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pd...
- adrian_b 3y agoThat low price was only in 2020, as a result of the huge air traffic decrease caused by COVID-19. The price of rhenium fluctuates wildly and a few years ago there was a maximum at $10 per gram. It is unlikely that it will ever return to the COVID-19 price. The problem with rhenium is not the current price, but the minuscule production, for which there is very little hope that it could be increased much. If instead of being used in a few military and commercial airplanes and in a few industrial applications, like thermocouples or catalysts, there would be demand to use it in something used by everybody, the price would increase quickly.
- josaka 3y agoMy intuition matches yours. It's abundant enough to find its way into alloys for jet engine blades at single digit percentages: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/science-features/whats-rhenium-doing-jet-engine https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/science-features... And if used in chips, you don't need to make the full substrate with this material, just a few hundred nanometers at the top, in the active area.
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoExactly my point, you said it better than I did. People don't have understanding of what expensive is. Even at hundreds or thousands of dollars per gram it could be pretty much irrelevant to the end result cost if you only need a layer that is couple nanometers in width.
- bob1029 3y agoThe cost of the raw materials is a rounding error compared to all other aspects of semiconductor manufacturing. The entire industry is a game of "value-add". The blank silicon wafers start out with effectively zero (or negative) value. The raw materials are worthless to the business. Only once validated features (process layers) begin to accumulate do those raw materials begin to inherit some sense of value.
- lost_tourist 3y agoAre you discounting the cost of development of technology to support the new semiconductor material? that along with it's rarity is what I suspect they're talking about.