So like, if sand can be used as the first “ingredient” of a CPU, is it possible to use other variants of sand? Or is there only a very SPECIFIC kind of sand used for CPU creation?
So you can’t use fine sand from the beaches of a tropical island or black sand in Iceland?
Sorry if this is dumb, I thought it’d be humorous if you can use any sand as the first resource for building a CPU since they literally come from that source.
No.
Sand to wafers… Fortunately, there is no shortage of raw material. Silicon is the second most common element in the earth’s crust, comprising about 26% and exceeded only by oxygen at 49%. But silicon does not occur naturally in the pure form needed for electronic applications, for which it must contain less than one in a billion non-silicon atoms. The starting material really is sand. Not just any sand, but silica sand, specially quarried for this purpose and having concentrations of quartz (silicon dioxide) as high as 95%.
You could probably use most sands or rocks, it’s just cheaper to start with more silicon dioxide since the purification processes will result in higher yields.
Arsenic is another option. Optical circuits are coming around, biological circuits are coming around.
The only limiting factor is if you can make a logic gate in it.
If I recall, sand is a WASTE product of getting pure enough silicon.
Sand is not per se the raw resource for integrated circuit production. More specifically, it is silicon dioxide, also referred to as quartz. Quartz is often found in sand, but sand does not necessarily include quartz. As far as I know, the quartz for semiconductor lithography isn’t usually extracted from sand, but rather from proper pit mines.
You need silicon.
The earth’s crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn’t contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth’s crust so 25-50 percent.
So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you’re left with pretty much pure silicon, you’re good to go.
I’m not sure if they literally use sand as the base material, but SiO2 (aka sand) would have to be reduced to metallic Si before the silicon crystal can be grown.
