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.
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.
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.
