alt Hacker NewsI'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you would even consider doing it in space in the first place is because, on Earth, gravity and other forces are stronger and result in lower-purity crystals. Basically, what I'm getting at, is that I believe this is pretty much a glorified oven. Moving the entire manufacturing process in space wouldn't make sense, as I don't think the benefits to other steps of the process like CVD would outweigh the insane costs of sending things into orbit.
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Note that growing ingots is an incredible feat at that purity and size that they achieve on earth. It’s already a very very hard step in a crazy process for entire chip manufacturing.
In a way that's good because they don't need logistics for the entire supply and production chain up there, they can just drop the (small and presumably valuable) silicon crystals back to Earth.
If you've managed to find more details about what process exactly they're implementing I'd be glad to see it - I assumed plasma-based growth, since the BBC article mentions that it's a plasma that is at 1000C here (making heat dissipation less of a problem too), but if they're growing ingots that would usually be done from liquid silicon, which sounds like a mess in space. So are they doing plasma-growth of ingots (which I haven't heard of, but I haven't heard of many things), or are they bringing wafers up and growing ultra-pure layers on top... The website is not super clear on this from what I've seen.
Do gravity-based defects outweigh displacement defects from fast particles?
Also, there are large headwinds from having to ship up a large quantity of raw material and have to deorbit a payload so fragile that any amount of shock is unacceptable. Maybe a high purity silicon boule pays for these headwinds with room for profit on top. I'm skeptical, but time will tell.
>this is not manufacturing chips in space
*crisps
It's from the UK.