Silicon is just the base material. It gets treated with a whole bunch of chemicals that work as dopants, and those are made of much rarer stuff than silicon.
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Muffi@programming.dev 8 months ago
“extremely rare” is a way of saying second most common that I haven’t heard before.
herrvogel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
JayDee@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Sure, Silicon works as a cheap base. Boron, phosphorus, arsenic and antimony are also used in the process, though. Other elements are also finding use in the process.
There is also a minor step in the middle. When scribing process is happening, the other elements are embedded into or deposited onto the substrate between ‘scribings’.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 8 months ago
I don’t think they mean silicon, they mean gold.
Rodeo@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Gold also isn’t all that rare. It’s value is so high because of jewelry marketing, not rarity.
oce@jlai.lu 8 months ago
You may be confusing with diamonds. Gold is, and in fact, any element heavier than iron are pretty rare because they cannot be created by stars alone according to current models, they need more extreme and rare astrophysics phenomenons like supernova and black holes.
Rodeo@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Yes I think that is the exact confusion I had.
TheChurn@kbin.social 8 months ago
Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.
Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.
There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
That is a mind blowing fact about all gold fitting in 23 cubic meters. I had to fact check it because it sounds so absurd: www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100
brakenium@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Is that 23mx23mx23m or 23 cubic meters?
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Technically correct but just cause there are minerals in the ground doesn’t mean they can be extracted.
Maybe i am wrong but i keep hearing about silicon being harder to come, i suppose op was specifically speaking about the silicon usable for computing.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 8 months ago
silicon being harder to come
interesting silicone usually makes it easier for me to come
TheChurn@kbin.social 8 months ago
The form of silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing, specific formations of sand, is becoming harder to source from the environment. Silicon the element is incredibly abundant - the vast majority of all rocks on Earth are silicates - so there isn't a risk that we run out of silicon itself any time soon.
What may happen, in several decades, is an increase in price due to the need to process more abundant rocks to obtain pure silicon.
fidodo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The rare stone thing would be better for nuclear power. Find lots of rare stone, put it together in a huge pile, they get warm and cause mysterious diseases.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Uranium is actually pretty common, refining out the right isotope is the complicated part. Heck there were natural nuclear reactors in a couple places that generated power for a few million years.
fidodo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Isn’t uranium that’s pure enough naturally to cause a reaction on its own really rare? I’m referring to the Chicago Pile experiment. It was so simple that it could have been theoretically been built thousands of years ago which is crazy to think about.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not really. Every single shovel full of dirt has trace amounts. It’s just gathering enough into a pile. Like I said, nature did it on earth, before humans existed